


everybody's pickin' up on that feline beat

by Sorrel



Series: everybody wants to be a cat [3]
Category: Fallout 4
Genre: F/M, Under-negotiated Kink, honesty is overrated, i ship deacon/lack of emotional self-awareness, kink dynamics, no ship like partnership, self-awareness is overrated, undercover nookie
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-02-07
Updated: 2016-12-22
Packaged: 2018-05-18 16:55:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 65,366
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5935996
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sorrel/pseuds/Sorrel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>'cause everything else is obsolete</i>
</p><p>Spring to fall: six months in the life of the Railroad's best and brightest agents, lying and spying their way across the Commonwealth, stopping the bad guys, saving the day, and having a lot of excellent sex while they're at it.  For this pair of loners, partnership has never looked so good.  What could possibly go wrong?</p><p>(Definitely not something as simple as <i>feelings</i>.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Acknowledgements on this go wholeheartedly to [chaya](http://archiveofourown.org/users/chaya/pseuds/chaya)/[buzzbites](http://buzzbites.tumblr.com/), my magnificent editrix. This story is at least 200% better than it would have been without her input.
> 
> It's worth noting (because I know it can be a contentious thing in this fandom) that I do actually believe Deacon's backstory from his final affinity talk, and I also subscribe to the theory that Deacon is John D. from the PAM mainframe terminal entries. Both of those facts are definitely reflected to this fic; fair warning if that's not your bag.
> 
> If you've been reading this as I've posted this [to my tumblr](http://sorrelchestnut.tumblr.com/tagged/everybody-wants-to-be-a-cat), this probably looks a little different than you remember. Editing is hard, yo.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please also be aware that this chapter contains an explicit depiction of fairly violent bdsm sex. Both parties fully consent, but with extremely minor discussion ahead of time and nonexistent negotiation. If you're concerned, please send me a message here or on tumblr and I'll be happy to provide more specific content descriptions.

Spring comes early, just as Whisper predicted, and Deacon spends the first week of March making jokes about black magic until she threatens to make a Deacon voodoo doll and prove him right. Glory gets stuck on a combat run with them for two days at the end of the week and threatens to make voodoo dolls of _both_ of them if they don’t shut up, and Deacon and Whisper high-five behind her back, not anywhere near subtle enough based on the way she turns on them with murder in her eyes. Afterwards, they all split a bottle of whiskey down at HQ and call truce, and Deacon eyes Whisper the next morning, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and not hungover at all, hanging out at Glory’s usual desk and making their Angel of Death laugh, and wonders what she’s thinking.

It’s the first night they keep separate bedrolls in weeks.

Their run with Glory aside, March is a quiet month, and Deacon takes ruthless advantage of the momentary break to catch up on old business: checking in on far-flung runners, refilling supply caches, and handing out caps like it’s going out of style, enough to make sure his recruiters have enough bribe money to get back in business. He and Whisper barely see the inside of HQ for the better part of the month, too busy travelling hither and yon across the far reaches of the Commonwealth on one errand after another, and Dez starts to give them the evil eye whenever they swing through to drop off reports. Deacon’s not feeling too broken up about it, to be honest. He’s always been more of an “in the field” sorta guy, and besides- who wants to sleep in a literal tomb, surrounded by ferals (and worse: the lingering stench of authoritarian disapproval) when instead he could be sleeping next to a beautiful woman, out under the stars? Not that Deacon’s in any hurry to explain it that way to Dez.

_Still_ , he thinks doubtfully, as they swing back into the city after a few days on the coast to stock up on supplies before they head south. _There’s something to be said for a day off here or there._ The last thing he wants to do is burn her out when things are just starting to get fun.

“Maybe we should take a break,” he says, and Whisper pauses in shoving stimpaks into the medkit, giving him that look that says that maybe that super mutant hit him a little harder on the head than they thought.

"Why?" she asks, with genuine curiosity, and Deacon can only shrug, because, well. Good point.

"It's a thing that people do.” Other people. “Or so I'm told."

"Maybe after this run," she says.

But they don't.

The last gasp of winter weather hits them right at the end of March, and they spend a frigid week on the road, hitting up his six most reliable recruiters in order to scope out the new talent and authorize a round of promotions. Deacon’s never been much a fan of the cold, and a lot less so ever since he started shaving his head, but it’s considerably more bearable when he’s spending it huddled up in a pile of scavenged blankets with his very warm-blooded partner, arguing over the recruitment files. Cold hands, warm heart, as she likes to joke; she has no compunction against sticking freezing fingers up his shirt to warm them on his belly, but in the middle of the night she’s like a little furnace, keeping their bedroll warm. It’s an invaluable addition to the Commonwealth Experience(™), even if she is _incredibly wrong_ about some of the new runners.

“I can’t believe you think that he’s your first pick,” Deacon says, stabbing his finger against the file. “Look at that vandalism charge! Because nothing screams ‘covert operative’ like having ‘desperate for attention’ written all over you.”

“Oh yes, because yours is so much better,” she retorts. “With your little Miss ‘I’m ripe for bribery, ask me how.’”

“That’s why _we’re_ the ones bribing her, Whisper,” he says. “You-” He stops. Clears his throat. “You know, I think I’m going to table this discussion.”

She grins up at him. The lamplight catches the flex of the muscle in her arm, the twist of her wrist. “Why’s that?”

“Because I don’t want to tell you how wrong you are and have you stop what you’re doing with your hand,” he grits out, and she laughs and strokes him faster.

(They end up flagging both the files. Whisper might be new to the spy business, but she’s got a commander’s untrained but practiced eye for raw talent. He might not always agree with her conclusions, but she’s got a different angle on things, sees strengths and weakness that he doesn't in the people that they have to evaluate. He’s not going to ask her opinion just to disregard it, not when her instincts have always been stellar.)

The addition of new runners means that their fumbling intel chain, barely intact after the Switchboard went down, finally starts to solidify. It's not as good as it was before but- getting there. It’s enough that Deacon starts to feel like he might finally be able to do something besides endlessly put out fires. They have enough manpower to do a proper background on some of the more reliable tourists that Glory favors, enough that Carrington is willing to grudgingly authorize bringing the newbies on in a more permanent capacity.

“Which means… what, exactly?” Whisper asks. They’re staking out a raider camp near one of the Minutemen settlements, a favor that she’s doing for Preston Garvey in exchange for the license to slip a couple of recruiters into the merchants arriving at the Castle. Deacon would have done it _anyway,_ obviously, but this way they stay on the General’s good side, make him think it’s all nice and above board. Which means he’s not going to be looking for the runners that they _didn’t_ ask permission to place. Tidy.

"Mostly it means it'll get easier," he says. "We'll still be needed for combat work, but some of the immediacy will ease up a little. Once Glory gets a chance to show them the ropes, anyway."

"Well that sounds… nice," she says. He looks at her through his scope, sees the doubtful face she's making down her rifle. It's a much better view than the raiders currently trying and failing to cook some mole rat that hasn't been gutted properly. He can smell it even from all the way up here, and he's kinda regretting the ration bar he had for breakfast earlier. Ugh.

"You sound less than convinced, partner."

"Let's just say that I have my doubts about _anything_ getting easier, 'stead of the other way around."

"So pessimistic!" he chides. "Besides, it's not like we'll have less to do. We can work on some longer-term objective for a change, maybe even get a hand into one or two of my pet projects."

"I'll put a hand in _your_ pet project," she says, and lifts her cheek off the rifle, looks directly over to him and gives the most ludicrous eyebrow-waggle he's ever seen. He chokes on a laugh.

"Never mind, I take it back," he says. "I don't want your input anyway."

"Yes you do," she says confidently, like she knows that he doesn't always have the best eye for combat possibilities. Like she's fully aware that his first instinct is always to lie his way in, that Glory doesn't have the subtlety to see the other side and they don't have anyone else to ask, not anymore. That he's gotten used to having her bird's eye view.

"Guess I do," he says, and grins.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The weather continues to warm as March ticks over into April, and Drums sends them on another errand for Randolph: some mutie den sending out raids along an extraction route. They make a game out of it, counting kills and setting each other increasingly absurd challenges as they work their way through the den. Carrington would probably kill them if he knew they did shit like this- _sloppy and distasteful_ , he’d probably call it, but Carrington’s an asshole, so.

Deacon, now, Deacon mostly just calls it _fun._ Which, okay, probably makes him seem more than a little bit like a serial killer, he’s gotta admit. But to be fair, in the list of things that make him a sketchy motherfucker, it’s pretty far down the list. And it’s hard to feel guilty for being such a bastard when he’s got someone like Whisper right down in the muck with him, wagering the bar tab on their kill count and betting him that he can’t shoot a mutie’s pistol right out of its hands.

(He can.)

“Excellent work, you two,” Dez says, when they report back in a few days later. (They might have taken a slight detour through Goodneighbor to check in on some of his runners, but who’s counting?) “Whisper, I believe PAM would like to speak to you about a DIA cache that she’s identified, if you’d be so kind?”

“I’ve always got time for terrifying women who can kill me with a single claw,” Whisper says cheerfully. She wanders off, detouring by Tinker’s workstation to give him a hard time about something. Deacon turns to watch her go, smiling faintly when he sees Whisper says something oh-so-casually that spurs Tinker into taking that deep breath that means he's winding up for a rant. When he looks back Dez is eyeing him with a speculative look he doesn't entirely trust.

“What’s up, boss?”

"You and Whisper continue to work well together," she says, thoughtfully. In Deacon's experience, life tends to get unnecessarily complicated when the boss starts getting _thoughtful_ at him. What remains to be seen is if it's better or worse than _concerned._

"Was that ever in any doubt?"

The tip of her head tells him that yes, yes it was. "You know as well as I that there were… qualms, at the way she was brought on board."

Deacon snorts. "Just because Carrington-"

"Carrington wasn't the only one concerned, Deacon," Dez interrupts. She sighs when he frowns at her over the top of his shades. "Don't give me that disapproving look. She's long since proven her worth to any naysayers."

Deacon relaxes his jaw before he can grit his teeth too obviously. She's the best fucking thing that's happened to the Railroad in years, and there are people who- Nope. Not his problem. "I would have thought her performance down in the Switchboard would have taken care of that."

"If you think I'm unaware of the way you were exaggerating for dramatic effect, you are gravely mistaken," she says with a twitch of a smile. It's inviting, very _all right, Deacon, time to share the joke._ Hah! As if he'd break _that_ easy.

"Dunno what you're talking about, boss."

Her amusement seems a bit more like irritation now. "Yes, I'm sure. Well, your _overestimation_ of the dangers aside, she was at least demonstrably capable in combat situations, and your… enthusiasm for her promotion took care of the rest."

Deacon knows a _but_ when he hears one. "So what's the problem?"

If she keeps sighing like this, it's going to start getting mighty windy in here. "It's not a _problem,_ Deacon. Merely a concern."

_It's a trap,_ he thinks, instinctively, and tenses up even as he keeps his shoulders loose, hiding it. "I've heard that before, boss," he says easily. "But I'm not sure why. Whisper's doing fine."

"Is she?" Desdemona asks, raising her eyebrows. "She hasn't taken more than a day or two between missions since she's joined us-"

"We've all been busy-"

"Not _all_ of us have been that busy, Deacon," she says. "Just you two."

He raises his eyebrows. "It's not like you to start complaining about _good_ results, Dez."

"Which is why I'm not," she says. "But the end doesn't always justify the means."

"Well, _that's_ a speech you haven't bothered to break out in my direction in a while," he drawls. And he's not entirely sure where it's coming from now. _What_ means _?_ They've been tremendously well behaved, all things considered. "I'm a little _concerned_ that you're breaking it out now. What's the occasion?"

They haven't done anything recently to set this off, not that he knows. All of their missions have gone smoothly- or at least as far as she knows from their reports- and they've had a continually high success rate. They've got consistently good intel, no one's spotted any coursers in months, the roads have never been so clear, and they've done all of it without pissing off the Commonwealth by mowing down bystanders, _thank you Glory._ What's their fearless leader got to complain about? Hell, she hasn't even _seen_ Whisper in-

_Ah,_ he thinks. _That would do it._

"The 'occasion' is a very capable but very junior agent who's been working for some months straight without any real leave," Dez says, raising her eyebrows at him challengingly. "Not everyone shares your desire to be in the field twenty-four/seven, you know. Even Glory comes back to HQ once in a while."

_Yep, sure enough._ "Not a lot of intel to be found inside these four walls, boss," he says cheerfully. He's somewhat less than enthusiastic about having round three hundred and seventy of _Why won't Deacon be a good boy and live at the HQ for no good reason_ , using her concern for his partner as window dressing. "I mean, I like gossip as well as the next guy, but ever since I got banned from participating in the betting pools, it's just not the same."

"It's not much of a pool if you're just taking everyone's caps all the time." She rolls her eyes. "I just want to make sure that we're not giving her too much, Deacon. Whisper is tremendously talented, as your reports have made clear, but she has after all only worked with us for three months- barely a season, when in the past we've spent years working with people before they're saddled with her level of responsibility. I don't want to risk losing her due to overwork. Not when we need her so badly."

_Funny that you only realized how much you needed someone like her after I rammed her down your throat,_ Deacon thinks. "If I promise to take a vacation, can we stop having this conversation?" 'Petulant teenager' is a trick that tends to work better on Carrington than it does on Desdemona, but he pitches his affected whine just enough to set off the indulgent quick at the corner of her mouth.

"I wouldn't believe you if you did," she sighs. "Ah, perhaps it's nothing. You would know her best, after all."

_About as well as anyone can,_ Deacon thinks. "Whisper's doing fine, boss. Hell, half the time I'm working to keep up with _her._ "

"Yes, I don't doubt that." She looks away, over to Tinker's workstation, and Deacon follows her gaze. Whisper's sitting on the edge of the desk, her legs swinging freely below, and she's watching their resident genius explain something that's probably only about three-quarters insane, judging by the amount of hand-waving going on. There's a patient, amused little quirk to the corner of her mouth that Deacon loves, but when he looks back to Dez, she just looks… tired. Worried, as well, but mostly tired. "I just want you to be careful, Deacon. You can get- focused, when you're working on something. I just don't want her to get into trouble because she's trying to keep up with you."

As if he'd ever get Whisper into any kind of trouble he didn't think he could get her back out of; he's not the agent known for collateral damage. Dez probably doesn't realize how close she's skirting to old arguments, old accusations. Deacon isn't looking to remind her. He's pretty sure she's not any more eager for another round of _maybe if you'd been around for your duties instead of chasing down fifty years of Institute history_ vs. _maybe if you didn't rely on a predictive algorithm with a catchy name and a thirty percent failure rate for your intel_ in tonight's episode of 'Who's to blame for the Switchboard.' He's pretty fucking tired, too, when it comes to that.

Deacon lets out a slow, controlled breath, and rocks back on his heels, shoving his hands in his pockets and giving her his best _aww, shucks_ expression. "You know me, fearless leader. I'm always careful."

Dez sighs, but she's fighting down a smile. Mission accomplished. "Go rescue your partner from Tinker," she orders him, and he shoots her a sloppy salute and makes his escape.

When he gets over to the Genius Corner, Tinker is in full rant mode, though it's hard to figure out what, exactly, he's ranting about. Deacon's heard most of his theories at one point or another, but Dez isn't wrong that he hasn't been around too much recently. There could be a new one he hasn't heard yet.

"-something called teamwork!" Tinker is saying. "It's one of the fundamentals encoded into the evolution of the human race. We've come so far-"

"Just because your thing is gizmos doesn't mean that everyone relies on 'em all the time," Whisper says. She's leaning back on her palms now and looks like she's enjoying herself hugely. "It's about the survival instinct. I think history has pretty well proven that we're a lot less in touch with it than we used to be."

Deacon comes up behind her and hooks an elbow around her neck, looking back and forth between the two of them. "Philosophical debate?"

"Yes," Whisper says, right as Tinker says "No!" He glares at Whisper. "I can't believe you're taking this stance. You use a sniper rifle!"

"I also use a knife," Whisper says, unruffled. "Sharp things have been used in offensive capability since time immemorial. Before mankind could smelt metal, they used stone. Just sayin'."

Deacon raises his eyebrows. This doesn't sound like a typical Tinker-rant. "So if not philosophy, what are the Railroad's two brightest lights discussing this evening?"

Tinker points at him. "You! You're a neutral third party."

"That might be the nicest thing anyone's ever called me," Deacon says, but the intensity of Tinker's expression doesn't waver. "Okay, sure. Hit me."

"If cavemen and astronauts got into a fight, who would win?"

Deacon looks back and forth between the two of them. "This is what you were discussing?"

Both nod, Whisper's hair brushing against the sensitive skin at the crook of his elbow. He taps the fingers of his free hand against his lips. "Do the astronauts have weapons?"

"No," they say in unison, and Deacon wavers for another moment, enjoying the impatient look on Tinker's face.

"Give me time to think about it," he says, finally, and Tinker lets out an explosive breath.

"I should have known," he says, and points at Whisper. "You! We're not done with this."

"Wouldn't dream of it," she says innocently, and then tilts her head to watch Tinker storm off. "That went well."

Deacon smirks back down at her. "I see you were keeping yourself entertained while I was otherwise occupied."

"Most fun I've had with my clothes on in, oh, _weeks,_ " Whisper says, and grins up at him. "Dez finished chewing you out?"

He should have known that she was paying attention. Situational awareness is another skill where she didn't need much in the way of instruction from him. "Dez is never finished chewing me out. It's an endless cycle. I'll be pushing the boulder up that hill for all eternity."

"Greek mythology, nice," she says appreciatively. "You keep busting out the classics, I’m going to have to start treating you like you’ve got a brain in your head after all.”

Why is he not surprised that she knew that one. “I am vast,” he misquotes. “I contain multitudes.”

She twists around to poke him in the belly. “Not that vast.”

He grabs her finger before she can get any more aggressive with her poking. If she ever finds out he’s ticklish, he’s sunk. She’s fucking ruthless. “I am surprisingly light-boned,” he agrees. “You should appreciate that about me. However else will you carry my fainting form through the middle of a gunfight?”

“Very carefully, obviously,” she says with disdain, and he snorts and scruffs a hand over the top of her head. "What was fearless leader after, anyway?"

_A lot of bullshit._ "Apparently we're at 'use it or lose it' with PTO," he says, leaning in like he's confiding something. "She wants to make sure that we take it before the fiscal year is up."

"It's April," she murmurs back. "I've got news for you. The fiscal year is up."

"Gasp!" he says, and straightens away. "But what about our seaside vacation?"

"A tragedy," she says solemnly, and pats his hand. "But you know, baby, it's only the best for you. You want the seaside, you _get_ the seaside."

He arches an eyebrow. "Is that so?"

"Yeah, we've been meaning to see what the Brotherhood is doing down by the old airport. That's on the ocean, right?"

Deacon laughs down at her, ridiculously fond. They're surrounded by their fellow agents, but for one moment, it feels like they're the only two people in the room. "Life's never boring when you're around, pal, and that's a fact."

She grins up at him. "Right back atcha, partner."

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

A couple weeks later, an open call on Radio Freedom beckons them out of the city and north into the hills, where there's a raider outpost sitting on top of the main road north out of the Commonwealth. It's the biggest target the fledgling Minutemen have attempted since retaking the Castle, and while Whisper's been pretty adamant about staying out of Minutemen business so that Preston can establish himself as a General without her interference, Deacon can tell that she wants to lend a hand.

"We could go," he offers, and hides a smile at the darting look she gives him. Hah, she actually thought he didn't notice her scowling down at her Pip-boy all day? _Sweetheart._ "I'm just sayin'. We've had problems on that route for months, and I for one am not above taking advantage of some outside backup to get the job done. It's win-win, really."

She looks at him for a minute, her head cocked to the side. "I remember something about Desdemona wanting all interactions with the Minutemen cleared through her first. Something about operational security."

He barely holds back his scoff. "She keeps using that word, I don't think it means what she thinks it-"

"Deacon."

He shoves his hands in his pockets. "We didn't exactly ask permission first when we did that favor for Preston last month."

"Yes I did," she says. This time he's the one to stare at her. "What? Just because you like to play all 'Rebel Without a Cause' doesn't mean the rest of us want to piss off the boss for kicks."

There was probably a time where Deacon was willing to waste time reporting back in _before_ a mission, but damned if he can remember when. "When did you even have time to-"

"Runners."

"Okay, but that doesn't mean we need to-"

"We gotta go back to resupply first anyway."

"Stop finishing my sentences," he says, faking more annoyed than he actually is. She just grins at him, easy, seeing right through it. Damn it. "We could resupply in any number of places. It doesn't have to be HQ."

"It doesn't have to be _not_ HQ, either," she says. "You just don't want to go back so soon because Dez chewed you out about being there more often."

"That wasn't... _exactly_ what that conversation was about," he says. She just stares at him. "That would be childish." She continues to stare at him. "Oh, shut up."

They go back to HQ.

"Ay, Deacon!" Drummer says, when the two of them come tumbling down the back tunnel. "And Whisper, hey. You okay? You look a little rough."

"Smooth talker," Whisper says wryly. Whisper's still limping from where she wrenched her ankle dodge-rolling away from a mutie hound, but Drums was probably talking about the bruise blooming on her jaw from where the hound's master made a spirited attempt to beat her bloody. Honestly, it looks a lot worse than it is. She's stimpaked already, and she was pretty insistent about using the board that nearly killed her as a crutch instead of leaning on him, so Deacon figures she's basically fine. "Just need a good night's sleep then I'm good to go. Hey, is Dez around?"

"Isn't she always?" Drummer says, and points to Carrington's workstation, where their fearless leader is clustered together with her second and a handful of other agents. "They got your message and they're waiting for debrief."

"Awesome," Whisper says, and makes to limp past, pausing when Drums clears his throat and doesn't move. "Yeah?"

"Look, we've just been talking, and Tinker and I were wondering..."

_Well that's nicely ominous,_ Deacon thinks, trading a look with Whisper. She puts on her best smirk and leans in conspiratorially towards Drums. "It's all natural," she confides. "I mean, I know blondes have more fun-"

Deacon doesn't have to fake his sudden snort of laughter. "That's just a rumor, partner," he tells her, and strokes a hand over the top of his head. "I mean, I would know."

Drummer doesn't even look his way. Aww. "Do the cavemen still get fire?" he blurts, and Whisper blinks at him for a long moment before she bursts out laughing.

"Seriously?"

Deacon claps her on the shoulder. "This is all you, partner," he says, and wanders off, feeling her glare between his shoulder blades.

Debrief goes about as well as he could have expected. Carrington is against getting the Minutemen involved in Railroad business, Desdemona is in favor of taking advantage of the connection as long as it's done carefully, and neither one of them is too interested in stopping to actually consult with either a) their primary intelligence officer or b) their primary intelligence officer's partner who rebuilt the Minutemen from the ground up. Deacon lasts through about ten minutes of bickering before he pulls out the notebook from his back pocket and scribbles something. Whisper looks up when he nudges her with his elbow, then down at the notebook he's sliding into her lap.

_If the cavemen get fire, the astronauts definitely get fire._

She rolls her eyes. _Well, obviously,_ she scratches back. _Both sides start with the same stuff. It's about brute strength and animal cunning versus advanced reason and tactical training._

_Where did the astronauts get tactical training?_

_Maybe they're Russian._

The sound of someone clearing their throat pointedly interrupts the fun, and Deacon takes his time closing up his notebook before he looks up to see both Desdemona and Carrington staring at them. "If you two are _quite_ finished?" Carrington says icily.

Deacon smiles lazily back. "Sure. How about you two?"

Whisper kicks him in the ankle. "What're our marching orders?" she says, a lot more politely. Carrington's expression softens marginally, but then again, he actually likes Whisper, whereas Deacon has spent untold hours making sure that Carrington wants to kick him in the shins on general principle. _Ah, partnership._

"Tinker's been experimenting with a new radio receiver that could boost our encrypted channels far enough to reach some of our more… far flung operatives," Carrington says. "Some even outside of the Commonwealth, perhaps. Since this outpost you mentioned is on top of a very large radio tower-"

"Perfect test subject," Whisper confirms. "Makes sense. Two birds, one stone."

Desdemona nods. "I do realize this is a big thing to ask, considering your commitments to the Minutemen,” she tells her, in her best 'I’m on your side, and you want to do me a favor' voice. It’s pretty good, Deacon’s gotta give her that. “If it makes you uncomfortable, we can find another operative-”

“-who doesn’t know half as much about Minutemen tactics as I do,” Whisper says, looking amused. She’s got about as much respect for authority as Deacon does, really, she just hides it a bit better. It’s one of the many things he appreciates about her. “It’s fine, boss. I stepped down from my rank with the Minutemen well before I joined this organization, and I’m not concerned about any conflicts of interest."

"You're certain?"

"If you’re reluctant to utilize my full skillset, that’s your problem. Not mine.” Whisper gives an angelic smile when Dez hits her with the beetle-browed stare. “Ma’am.”

Dez sighs. “I begin to see why you two work together so well,” she says dryly to Deacon, who does his best 'who, me?' expression. “Very well. Tinker has the transmitter prepared for you, and if you need anything else to outfit yourselves for the mission, you need only ask.”

“Oh, I think we’ve got it covered,” Whisper says mildly.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

It’s her idea to steal a pair of uniforms from one of the settlements they pass through on the way up north, but Deacon’s the one who actually makes the lift. They join the squad at Zimonja as just another pair of recruits, dusty and eager and way too green to be calling themselves soldiers. The squad is headed up by a man named Captain Adams, a road-weary fellow of middling age that Whisper privately speculates was a former Gunner, who splits everyone into two teams, shooters to the front and a strike team to take the compound from behind. Whisper gives Deacon a smirking salute from beneath the brim of her threadbare cap, pulled down low over her eyes, before she heads off with the strike team, the comm line open between them like a live wire. Just the way he likes it.

“Standard bets?” she says, while they’re getting into position.

Deacon turns his head so the others can’t see him apparently talking to himself. He’s got a spot up on the rocks out of earshot, but that doesn’t mean some of them won’t be able to spot it if they look his way. “What, this isn’t exciting enough for you?”

“Maybe I just need some motivation,” she says. He can hear the small rustling noises of a slight body working its way through tall grass. “I find caps very motivating.”

He has to turn a laugh into a cough, because, well, if there’s ever been a woman less motivated by money, he’s not yet met her. Whisper views caps with the same amused, utilitarian view he does: easy come, easy go, useful for what they can get you but there’s always more where that came from. Money, in his experience, is just about the least useful form of security in their line of work. "Bullshit," he says. "But hey! Never let it be said I don't know how to show a lady a good time. If you need a little more excitement, partner, then it's my job to provide. Want to put something a little more.... interesting on the line? Bar tabs are so last week."

She snorts. "You just don't want to pay because I can drink you under the table, but sure. I'm game. What kind of... interesting are we talking?"

The little smear of innuendo in her voice tells him that her mind's going on the same track his is. Delightful. "Oh, I don't know. I was thinking we could put a couple of... favors on the line. Real friendly-like."

He keeps his voice blandly innocent, but there's still a little indrawn breath from her end of the line that tells him that she twigged to it. Excellent.

Only then there's an awkward little pause where the expected smart-ass remark should be, and he realizes with a weirdly sinking feeling that it's the first time either of them have actually _said_ anything about it since the time in Bunker Hill. Shit. Is it weird now? Did he break some kind of unwritten rule?

Then her voice comes back on the line, sounding nothing but amused. “What’d you have in mind?”

_This is stupid,_ he thinks, but he still says, “I’m just saying, you could stand to put your money where your mouth is. Or, you know-”

“My mouth where my money is?” she finishes, amused. “Well, that is a tempting offer. Assuming you’re willing to put up the same.”

Deacon licks his licks and thinks about the last time, on his belly with her thighs around his ears and her trying like hell not to make too much noise in case one of their neighbors complained- “You know me, partner. I’m not the kind to back down from a dare.”

“You’ve got yourself a deal,” she says, and then people start shooting.

She ends up winning on the kill count by a mile, but it’s his bullet that takes out the commander in the power armor. They rendezvous with the rest of the squad in the middle of the outpost, everyone busy hauling away the bodies and tending to the wounded and breaking out the hooch, and Whisper looks up at him thoughtfully, still wiping her blade clean of blood.

“Want to call it a draw?” she says, and his throat goes dry at the many and varied possibilities _that_ offers.

“Depends on what that means.”

She grins wickedly. “I think you’ll like it just fine,” she says, and, well- he definitely doesn’t doubt that.

Everyone clusters around the fire that night, only a token pair of guards left to stand watch, and in true soldier fashion, everyone gets fuckin’ legless drunk on some hillbilly moonshine one of the kids brought from his daddy’s farm. (“Priorities,” Whisper says into his ear, “you gotta admire ‘em.”) He and Whisper start out on opposite ends of the downed log they’re using as a bench but migrate closer throughout the evening, and when people start dropping away from the fire Whisper gets up and tugs him back to their assigned bunk on unsteady feet, failing to muffle too-loud giggles into his shoulder as they pass by some of the others sleeping and pressing laughing kisses against his mouth. He can taste the ghost of the moonshine on her tongue, faint enough that he knows she took no more than her usual token sip before dumping the rest of it. Too bad. The hooch was actually pretty good, for some backwater still. Shame it was wasted on the two of them.

Deacon fumbles them through the door to the bunkhouse and then fucks her right there on the desk, scattering scraps of paper and empty mentats tins and making way too much noise. Someone calls a congratulation through the door as they pass, and Deacon laughs into her neck, still panting and just starting to soften.

“I thought fraternization was frowned upon,” he says, and she snickers and runs her hands down his shoulders, digs her fingers into the big muscles along his back. He gives a little groan of pleasure and drops his forehead against her collarbone.

“You might not think much of us, but this is the army, pal. If you think we’re the only ones fucking tonight, you are _gravely_ mistaken.”

“Oh yeah? How’d you know so much about it?”

“Soldiers are the same the world over, D. Only the uniforms change.”

Deacon stores that away in his mental Whisper file, which is just a hazy list of things like _went hunting_ and _used to be a sniper_ and _probably emigrated from another city_ and _came from a vault maybe???_ It’s not a very comprehensive list, but that’s half the fun of it. Now he can add _was a soldier, somewhere_ , which is interesting. Hard to imagine her in any kind of uniform.

“For the record,” he says, pressing a sucking kiss into the join of her neck, “when you said to call it a draw, I had something with a little more _finesse_ in mind.”

“Oh, is that so,” she says lazily, and squeezes his shoulder. “Well, we’ve still got a couple hours till we can move. Want to move this to the bunk and show me what you had in mind?”

“Oh,” he says, and hoists her up by her ass, relishing the shriek of laughter she presses into his throat and the way her thighs cling to his hips for balance. “I think I can manage that.”

The fire’s banked down low by the time they creep back out of the bunkhouse, and there’s a handful of people passed out around it but even the lone two sober guards aren’t exactly looking inwards at the center of the camp, where the radio tower juts towards the sky. Deacon stands guard while she scales it quickly, just a shadowed smear of movement against the dark-rusted metal supports, and clamps Tinker’s receiver onto the main wire. She slides back down faster than Deacon considers strictly safe, and they trade out their bluecoats for assorted gear pulled off the raiders they killed and walk out a pair of down-on-their-luck scavvers, too ragged for city trade and barely reputable enough for the caravans.

“So, still think the Minutemen are just a bunch of wannabe soldiers with too much ammo and not enough brains?” she asks him, two miles south and the sun just starting to come up. They’ve been following the road in deference to the dark, but as soon as dawn hits properly they’ll veer south through the woods and make their way down to a friendly farm nearby, scrub up enough to pass as mercs and join one of the caravans to head back to the city the safe way. HQ can reach them on her Pip-boy, now, and they’re not in any hurry to get anywhere in particular.

“Well, some of them have their uses,” he allows. She beams, pleased at the compliment, until he continues, “That Captain Adams, for one-" He breaks off laughing when she whips around to glare at him, dancing backwards before she can get him with one of her pointy elbows. “I don't know, partner, maybe if I met a real Minuteman I could decide. Ooh, I know, what about that general I'm always hearing so much about?"

"If you have a thing for Preston I’d be happy to introduce you-” she starts, but he just shakes his head mournfully.

"No, the old one. You know, the one who quit-”

“Shut your face.”

“-too bad she’s not around. That's the kinda girl I need in my life. Someone dashing, maybe a fancy hat-" He reaches out to sweep a hand over the top of her bare head, and she ducks away. "-someone who can sweep me off my feet. That'd really get my motor running."

"How about if I knock you off your feet, that work?" she says, and he taps his chin, pretends to consider it.

"I don't know. Maybe if it was the General offering, instead of some retired wannabe-"

"That's it, put 'em up," she says, holding up her fists, "we're gonna fuckin' go," but they're both still too tired to get into a proper tussle, and so after a pro-forma attempt she lets herself be captured under the cage of his arm. She sighs and leans her head against his shoulder. “You're lucky I'm retired, punk. You I'd have time to get into trouble with you if I was still riding herd on these kids all the time?"

“Counting my lucky stars, partner," he says, and taps her nose with his free hand. "You good to keep on?" They haven’t slept since the night before the attack, and they’re filthy and bruised and exhausted, Deacon with a sore shoulder from where his armor took a stray bullet and her wrist splinted from a boot that landed on it hard enough that she’s lucky she got away with a sprain. “If you want to rest for a bit, we’ve probably got enough distance to hole up for a couple hours.”

“Nah, I’m good,” she says, and gives his waist a squeeze. Despite the blur of exhaustion in her voice, her stride is as steady as ever. “Let’s just keep going.”

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

In May they spend a week out west, just a pair of farmhands for hire picking up a few extra caps during the tail end of planting season. The fact that the farm they’re working on is big enough to have a population of drifters coming through and a dedicated recruitment beacon with power enough to cover the hills area is, of course, pure coincidence. (The fact that the farm is one of the major producers for the Minutemen trading routes is _actually_ coincidence, but a useful one. At least they know the lay of the land.)

They spend three days in the muck of the fields, taking turns driving the brahmin down the rows with the plow and following behind with the seeds, which is not exactly included in the Railroad training manual but not something that he’s forgotten how to do, either. Whisper, he can’t help but note, doesn’t have any more trouble with it than he does. Grew up on a farm, maybe?

“No, I grew up poor and urban,” she says on day three, when he manages to nudge her into bringing it up. (She’s got an amused, tolerant look that tells him he wasn’t as subtle as he hoped he was about pumping her for information, but that’s fine.) “Used to collect used needles to sell back to the dealers like some kind of demented matchstick girl. Dad grew up out in the country though. I think that’s why he used to take us on hunting trips.”

_Grew up in a city/definitely not Boston,_ he adds to his mental list. _Had a sibling???_ “Well, you’re not too shabby at this farming business for someone who grew up on the mean streets.”

She laughs at him- quietly, so as not to wake any of the others they’re sharing the bunkhouse with. There’s an empty bottle of cheap whiskey and more Jet canisters than he’s seen in one place outside of Goodneighbor all currently melting in the fire outside, so he’s not too worried about waking the _dead_ at this point, but it still pays to be cautious. “Who do you think helped set up the settlements in the first place?” she says. “I had to figure it out pretty quick, those first few months.”

_First few months._ So she joined the Minutemen pretty recently after her arrival in the Commonwealth. Interesting, since as far as he’s been able to tell, they were pretty much all dead or raiders until she came along. Maybe she came out from the west, stumbled into Concord before she made it the rest of the way into Commonwealth? Deacon’s seen weirder stories. “Well, I can’t fault your capacity to learn new things,” he drawls, and she snickers at the insinuation in his voice and shoves at his shoulder.

“Now _that,_ I definitely already knew how to do.”

Day four is a half-day, and they sneak away from the celebration already in full swing in the mess hall to try and plant Tinker’s new transmitter on the radio beacon. He’s just finishing up the wiring when she hisses a warning and they hear the unmistakable burbling click of a Mr. Handy approaching. Deacon’s mind races along how to play this- he could play drunk, could pretend to be a mechanic, Mr. Handies aren’t exactly the brightest tools in the shed even when some long-ago chemhead hasn’t fucked with their personality protocols- but Whisper just gives him a wicked grin and slides to her knees in front of him.

So when good ol’ Professor Goodfeels rounds the corner, Deacon’s got his hands in her hair and she’s got her clever long fingers on the buttons of his jeans, fumbling them open and already pressing kisses to his belly. Everyone freezes when the robot spots them (Deacon because he’s only mostly sure he’s covering up the loose wiring with his back), but after a long, awkward moment, Goodfeels just says, “Grrooovy, man!” and wanders off again.

“You could keep going, you know,” Deacon says plaintively after he’s gone- she’s about two inches and one very thin layer of fabric away from his cock, which is getting pretty interested in the proceedings on proximity alone- but the way she’s laughing hysterically sort of ruins the mood.

“We’ve got ten minutes till he comes back this way on patrol,” she says, still chuckling as she does his jeans back up. “How about you finish and I’ll make it up to you later?”

“I’ll hold you to that,” he threatens, but she definitely keeps her promise later that night, pinning his hands flat to the mattress and whispering into his ear that he’ll have to stay very, very quiet if he doesn’t want to wake everyone up. Deacon’s got no intentions of inviting anyone else to this party, and at his nod she lets go of his hands with a stern look to keep them where they are, slides down his body with a rustle of the blankets and pulls his cock out of his boxers. He's already getting hard, just at the promise of it, the brief cool touches of her slim hands as she moves him into position. He lets his head thump (quietly) back against the pillow and stares up into the darkened ceiling of the bunkhouse, trying not to moan and wishing like hell that he could watch. _Later,_ he promises himself, biting down on his wrist to keep from making noise, his other hand splayed hotly across her cheek, feeling her jaw strain as she screws his dick down her throat, the faintest of moans vibrating through to his fingers as she goes down, and down, and down.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

It wouldn’t do to sneak off too quickly now that the job’s done- not unless they want to start inviting questions about an oddly similar pair that keep showing up at Minutemen settlements and then disappearing a few days later. They elect for discretion as the better part of valor and they stick around for the rest of planting. After that most of the drifters are sent on down to the next settlement to try their luck, and he and Whisper (along with a few of their more sober compatriots) are chosen by the overseer to go up into the hills with a man who calls himself an “apiarist.” Deacon’s a little skeptical, but he’s glad he lets Whisper talk him into it when they spend an enjoyable afternoon throwing smoke bombs at a drone colony so the mad bastard can go in and collect the honey. He’s done worse for an assignment, and they all get bits of honeycomb for lunch, which turns out to be _amazing._ Deacon’s never had the stuff pure before. He’s never even _seen_ any, not for sale, not anywhere.

“You take me to the nicest places, partner,” he says, and Whisper laughs and presses a sticky kiss to the corner of his mouth. He obligingly licks the smear of honey she left, and grins. _Sweet._

“Well, I definitely wouldn’t want you getting bored of me so quickly.”

“I _don’t_ think that’s much of a worry.”

They troop back down into the grow-op filthy, sticky, covered in soot and triumphant, and the overseer expresses his gratitude by opening up the pipes to the bathhouse, instructing everyone with a wink to “double up for water conservation.” Deacon damn near drowns returning her the favor from the other night, but it’s worth it. After all, it wouldn’t do to have her getting bored either, now would it?

The gossip she hears from one of the other rooms is worth even more; a tip about how one of the big raider gangs is moving their goods across the north end of Boston. The drifter probably didn’t know what he was saying, or what it could mean to someone like them, but Whisper figured it out right quick, and afterwards she pulls him up and licks the taste of herself out of his mouth, mumbling the intel into his ear with her sex-hoarse voice. After that, well, they’ve got a few hours till they need to leave, and she’s wet and open for him already, and he slides right into her, muffling his moan into her neck and probably splashing a whole lot of water all over the floor.

Deacon already knew he was a lucky bastard, but it’s days like these that really bring it home: good food, better sex, and the best partner: his brilliant Whisper, who manages to finish a job while she’s getting eaten out. That’s some goddamn talent right there.

Although, not one he's planning on bragging about back at HQ.

That lead takes them back into Boston, for almost two weeks of scouting missions along the supply route before they finally figure out the main stash house. At that point they figure the gang’s probably pretty desperate for new recruits, considering the way they’ve been picking off strays, and they spend an afternoon getting appropriately filthy and bloody doing clean-up duty on a little pack of ghouls that’s been trying to move down into the tunnels above HQ, then shred up some extra leathers and mix up a weak ink mixture, because nobody’ll buy a psycho junkie with no track marks. His hand’s a little busted from where one of the ghouls got close enough to chomp on him, so she takes care of the injections for both of them, doing up her arms in a ruthless, too-fast line first before laying his good arm over her knees and spiking it up with a careful pattern that only makes sense to her.

She probably doesn’t strictly _need_ to sit on his lap to do it, but hey, who’s complaining?

“You look like you’ve got some practice with that,” he says, watching the needle rather than the way her tongue is poking out between her teeth in concentration. It’s kind of adorable. Cutest psycho ever.

“I mentioned my hilariously urban childhood, right?” she says. She leans in for a better angle and he shifts to accommodate so she doesn’t fall off, putting his free hand to her back to steady her. “And, well.” She clears her throat, not looking at him. “I used to use, back in the day. Not psycho!” she adds hurriedly, probably catching his incredulous stare out of the corner of her eye. “Jesus Christ, can you imagine?”

Unwillingly, Deacon pictures Whisper- tiny, quiet, easygoing Whisper- running full-tilt into a raider camp shouting “Fucking kill!” He can’t decide if the image is more funny or terrifying. “Not really, no.”

“Calmex was my drug of choice,” she continues, her hands still steady on the needle. She’s good; he can barely feel it going in. “They practically gave it out like candy to us snipers. And then Day Tripper when I got home from...”

She trails off, concentrating on her work, but Deacon can finish the sentence for her: _from the war,_ or maybe _from the front._ Only there hasn’t been anything like a proper war for two centuries, so unless she’s being fanciful he’s not sure where she could have served. Who the hell could afford to hand out Calmex, which is not exactly cheap to produce? Maybe one of the bigger merc groups, like the Gunners. Aside from the Brotherhood, that’s the closest you get to any kind of military in these parts, and he has a lot harder time imagining her working for the Brotherhood than her using psycho.

“You don’t use anymore.” He’d have noticed. Even if nothing else, he’d’ve noticed that.

“Nah, got clean a long time ago. Had family to look after.”

So did he.

“I’ll drink some, or use some Jet here or there, if I’m not working and it’s a friend offering, but I’ll always wash it down with Addictol the next day. Why risk it?”

“Why indeed,” Deacon murmurs. Aside from his first six months in the Railroad, when his first alpha gave him a nice little come-to-Jesus moment after he almost fucked an op, he hasn’t touched a chem since he was nineteen years old. Even when he needs to blend in for an op, he uses fakes and props, the way they’re doing now. He’s got enough chem-soaked regrets from his past, why add new ones from his present? “You don’t seem too out of practice.”

“You don’t seem to mind when I’m giving you a stimpack on the fly because you don’t know how to fucking dodge,” she retorts, then turns to put away the needle. “There, all done. Try not to ruin my masterpiece by letting yourself get bitten again.”

“I don’t know that ‘let’ is the best way to put it-” Then the word “masterpiece” catches his attention, and he looks down at his arm and squints. What seemed like a random application of punctures when she was putting them in does, upon further reflection, somewhat seem like- “Did you just draw a fucking dick on my arm?”

“Takes one to know one,” she says cheerfully, and swipes an affectionate hand across the top of his head before she hops to her feet. “Ready?”

“Ready,” he says, but he can’t stop staring down at his arm even as he grabs his rifle and follows her down the tunnels. “I can’t believe you,” he marvels. “You’re going to pay for that.”

She flashes a smile back over her shoulder, her too-white teeth a predator's snarl in the low light, her eyes black with challenge and something darker. She flicks her shoulder in a deliberate taunt, and he feels himself rocking forward onto his toes, letting the flush of anger chase its way up his back in response. She glances at him, a quick dart of her eyes, checking that he noticed. The smile he gives her in return is tinged with the psycho supposedly flowing through his veins.

"I believe," she says, her voice hoarse in a raider's shredded growl, "that was the idea."

"If that's what you want, baby, I can fuckin' give it to you," he growls back, and she laughs. If there's a bit of extra sway to her hips as she takes the lead, well, any psycho addict knows that it's not the kill that tastes the sweetest- it's the prize you take after.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Six hours later, they're in the middle of the raider base, intel in hand and bodies strewn about the floor above them, and Deacon leans against the wall and watches Whisper doing her usual too-thorough sweep, looking for junk, ammo, anything shiny that catches her fancy. At some point in the fight she shed her burly stolen jacket in favor of freedom of movement, and all she's wearing underneath is a torn undershirt and an armored ammo vest. He watches the tendons in her bare arms flex as she flips a toppled trunk back onto its right side with a tremendous heave, then the way her back muscles coil and stretch as she kneels down and picks the lock. There's a little smear of blood on her cheek, trailing off to her jaw, from where she absent-mindedly swiped it with the back of her knife hand, trying to get a stray lock of hair out of her face. There's a drop of sweat trailing down the bare curve of her spine, vanishing into the waist of her ill-fitting leathers, and he follows the path as if hypnotized.

_Yeah,_ he thinks to himself. Even in his own head, his voice sounds rough with bloodlust. _I'm doing this._

She's focused enough on the lock that she doesn't notice him closing in, soft-footed in his thin-soled raider's boots. She definitely notices when he ghosts his hand over her hair, lets his palm linger hotly over the curve of her skull, and it earns him a heated look, her fingers steady as a metronome. He takes in a deep breath, lets it out in a ragged exhale. Feels it settle over his shoulders like an enemy's arm.

He waits for the telltale click to echo into the strained silence between them, then grabs her by the back of the neck, hauls her to her feet, and slams her face-first against the wall.

Not so fast she can't catch herself, obviously- he's not looking to get disemboweled any time soon- but there's still a somewhat alarming creak when her braced hands impact with the somewhat structurally unstable wall, and Deacon pauses, his fingers still digging into either side of her neck. That was- a little harder than he intended. Maybe he should-

"Oh, I know you didn't just-," Whisper growls, raider-rough, and reaches for her boot knife. He lets out a silent breath of relief and grabs her hand before she can get there, collects its partner and pins both wrists against the wall above her head, so hard he can feel the bones grinding under his palm. Whisper bucks under him, probably not coincidentally shoving her ass back against his rapidly stiffening dick, throws herself to the left and to the right in a teasing facsimile of an escape attempt. If she wanted to get away, she could hook his foot with her own and send him crashing to the floor, could get a hand free a half-dozen increasingly painful ways and from there she could do anything she wanted and all his size and training wouldn't do a damn thing to save him. He’s seen people who thought they had Whisper trapped before. None of them realized that _they_ were trapped in with _her._

He noses against the shell of her ear and laughs silently at the sharp intake of breath. "Say _please._ "

"Go fuck yourself."

"I'd rather fuck you." He pulls back just far enough to get the tip of his wrist knife through the waist of her leathers, fumbling only a little with the clumsy fingers of his injured hand. Whisper goes still at the kiss of steel against her skin, and the buttery _rip_ of leather is loud over the sound of her quiet panting. He needs to see her face. "You going to hold still?"

She twists around to throw him a fierce grin, and he rewards her by giving her more of his weight, pressing his cock harder against her ass. Her rolled eyes are bloodshot at the whites from adrenaline and a bruise is forming up around a split at the corner of her mouth where she took a fist in the melee. There's the faintest smear of blood across her mouth, and she bares her teeth at him in challenge. "Make it worth my while, asshole."

"Maybe," he says, and throws away the knife to the side, rips her pants the rest of the way clear. She didn't bother with underwear when she got dressed earlier. Neither did he.

It's the work of a few quick moments to get his pants open, and his cock springs free into the cool spring air, fat and heavy with arousal. He spares only the briefest of moments to check that she's wet (she's fucking dripping, and even in her best attempts to hold still she still shudders at the quick flick of his fingers) and then he presses her slight body against the wall, covering it with his and working the head of his dick into her. She's so fucking tight, like it’s been weeks or months instead of days since she’s had anything inside of her, and a moan rattles out of her throat when he bottoms out.

He fucks her fast and brutal, scraping her face against the splintering wall to her yowls of encouragement, his grip and his cock forcing her up onto her toes, his bad hand tight on her hip. He can feel his pulse ratcheting up with every thrust, every wet noise, his balls tight and heavy with it already, the way she tries to shove him off even as she moans for it from between gritted teeth, her tight cunt dragging him in. He feels- he feels fucking wrecked, out of control, flushed up with filth and violence and desperation, and he can feel it coming like a goddamn freight train, stuck on the tracks and no way off.

Faintly, he hears her muttering something, and ducks his head in close to catch it. She cranes her head back, panting with every thrust, and gives him that insane grin.

"That- ah! That, all, you, got?" she gets out, and she laughs like a hyena as he feels his face twist down in rage. He presses her face harder against the splintering wall and shoves his dick into her harder, harder, feels it race down his spine like a spark down a line of gunpowder at the sound of her mocking encouragement. He sets his teeth against the back of her neck, possessive as any beast in rut, but it's when she throws her weight back against him like she's trying to either buck him off or get him deeper or _both_ that he bites down hard enough to draw blood and comes, hard and graceless and without waiting for her at all.

He collapses against her back, panting into the curve of her neck and licking the taste of copper off his lips, the quiver of aftershocks still jangling his nerves, his vision still black around the edges. Did he really just-

He never gets a chance to finish that thought, because like any good predator, she senses weakness and takes advantage of his moment of distraction and the slackening grip on her wrists in order to buck him off with a single tremendous heave. It knocks him back onto the floor, and he lies there, half-stunned and shuddering from the comedown, staring up at her. She looks like something out of a greek painting, like one of those furies, bruised and bloodied and snarling, and as he watches she yanks her ruined pants the rest of the way off, straddles him, and shoves herself down onto his still-hard dick.

"Oh _fuck,_ " he says, and puts his hands to her hips, less to steady her and more because he feels like he needs an anchor, a shudder rolling down his spine and his head spinning in a hundred different directions. He can still taste her blood thick and heavy on his tongue, and her fierce smile is bloody, her split lip smeared across it at some point during the fuck. She screws herself down onto him with fast, needy strokes, moaning like a bitch in heat as he squirms under her, oversensitive and sparking with aftershocks and feeling his spend slick and hot inside of her. Fuck, fuck, it's too much, too bloody, too filthy, too-

"Not yet you don't," she growls, and yanks his face back up, forces him to look at her with her grip like iron on his jaw. He shudders all over and she leans down and bites him on the chin and comes, and he follows a bare beat behind her with a final weak spurt that feels like it's wrenched out of him, almost painful in its intensity.

The sound of their panting breaths fills the silent room, and Deacon is weirdly aware of every inch of his body, the grit of the dirt under his bare head, the bony points of her knees gripping onto either side of his hips, the spark of pain on his chin already dulling down into the ache of a bruise, individual tooth marks distinct points of icy numbness in the middle. He gropes at her with fat, uncoordinated hands, and gets his palms onto her ass, listens to her own hands slap down on either side of his head, holding her steady above him.

_Fuck,_ he thinks faintly. That was- He wasn't planning for that. Just a game, he thought, expected them to crack up in the middle, only neither of them were laughing. Neither of them were laughing at all, except Whisper and her hyena cackle, his hot rush of rage that followed in response, deeper and darker than he expected and leaving him shivering and numb in the cold rush of shame that follows. That's not- He's not- No. Not like that-

And then Whisper makes everything better with a single gesture when she leans up and laps a licking kiss over the bruise she left on his chin. He closes his eyes in gratitude, feeling the shake in his fingers and his knees, and she nuzzles along the line of his jaw, nips at his earlobe with a rough little laugh that's more familiar than his own face in the mirror.

"You're lovely," she husks, and he can hear the smile in her voice. He's momentarily desperate to see it, and tugs at the back of her shirt until she leans up, still grinning. There's still blood on her lips, but all he can see is the warmth in her hazel eyes, the amused twitch at the unbruised corner of her mouth. "Thanks, partner. I needed that."

"Happy to oblige," he says, dazedly. "You should probably find some pants before reinforcements arrive."

"Aaaand there's you being a buzzkill." She climbs off of him, though- prompting a hiss from both of them when he slides free- and she makes a face and cups her hand over herself to catch the slide of his come out of her. It takes everything he has not to stare. "Towel first."

"Try to find something that won't give you a disease," he advises, on autopilot.

"You're so helpful."

She's back a few minutes later, though, cleaned up and with a new pair of pants scavenged up from God-knows-where. He's already up and dressed, with their weapons packed and ready to go, and she beams at him and hooks her arm through his, pulling him in her wake out into the foggy city night. She turns her face up to the moonlight, and Deacon looks down at her, thinks about asking- oh, he's not even sure. Is she okay? Was he- was it too much? Are _they_ okay? Because that's the only question that matters, when it comes down to it.

Then Whisper leans her head on his shoulder and starts telling him some incredibly filthy joke about a mortician and a chorus girl in some atrocious accent, and he almost shoves her off him, laughing. "What the hell is that accent supposed to be?" he interrupts, and she punches him in the arm (not gently) for trampling over her punchline. “It sounds like you dropped your r’s and then set them on fire.”

“That’s the one true Boston accent, D,” she says, thankfully in her own voice. “Just because you sound straight off the California beaches-”

_Where the hell would she have heard a Californian talk?_ he wonders, with no small sense of astonishment. Deacon’s only rarely met someone from the opposite coast, and he’s met- a lot of people, over the years. Kinda his thing. Ah, well, add it to the mental file.

“-doesn’t mean all of us are so uneducated.”

“You’re full of shit,” he says. “I’ve heard all the same radio plays you have, hotshot. You’re just making stuff up at this point.”

She shakes her head. “You’re so disconnected from your roots,” she says sorrowfully. “It’s a shame to see people fallen so far-”

“Full. Of. Shit,” he repeats.

“Maybe,” she says with a grin. “Or maybe I know something you don’t.”

“Now _that_ I’ll believe,” he says, and she laughs. It’s her undignified snort of a chuckle, and it’s infectious, and he feels laughter bubbling up in his own chest in response. Even so, he knows that it’s more relief than anything else. He still feels wobbly, loose-limbed in a way that doesn’t particularly have anything to do with orgasm, and out of the corner of his eye he can see the blood stained on the back of her collar, can still taste it lingering like copper on his tongue. They’re both going to need stimpacks to hide the evidence before they go back to base. He’s never… had sex that needed stimpacks before. As a thing.

They sleep that night in one of their usual boltholes, a basement room in an abandoned house a couple miles from HQ. It’s got a back exit to the sewers if they need to get out fast and it’s small enough that nobody else has found it yet, and they keep it stocked with a mattress and enough supplies to get them through a couple days if need be. Whisper lights them a candle and leaves it in the center of the room, away from anything flammable and just bright enough to see the entry points, and then joins him on the mattress, Deacon already half-asleep and drowsing. He starts to move away, to give her the usual spot by the wall, but she just curls protectively around his back, her arm looping over his ribs in a stranglehold and her cold nose pressing against the knob of his spine. He closes his eyes, feeling shaky and uncertain and grateful.

They’re okay. They’re okay. They’re okay.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

In early June, they head back to HQ for the first time in weeks to rest up, restock, and put in a little face time so that people (Dez) don't start to think they've gone rogue. Proof that no good deed goes unpunished, Dez immediately lands them with Glory’s new heavies and the instructions to 'show them the ropes.'

“And don’t even try to talk me out of it,” she adds, as Deacon is mentally preparing to do just that. “You haven’t had to take on training duties in over two years-”

“What am I, chopped liver?” Whisper mutters.

“-and Whisper is in dire need of a rundown since we started her immediately in new duties with no preparation,” Dez finishes, without missing a beat. “I happen to know that neither of you have anything else on at the moment. Take the time, Deacon. While we have it.”

There’s not a lot he can say in argument to that, so he and Whisper drop their gear and troop off to meet the new guys. There’s two of them, a man and a woman, and they’re very distinctly Glory’s people: lots of muscle, lots of scars, the light, on-their-toes balance of the painfully combat-ready and chips on their shoulders a mile wide. Deacon eyes them from across the room and runs through their mental files- their names, their former occupations, where they were recruited and why. He didn’t make the approach on either of them- that’s what recruiters are for- but he was the one who scouted them out initially, just like all their other tourists. They’re solid. Glory chose well.

Hmm. And neither of them have ever met him in person, which means that they don’t know who he is. Or, and more importantly here, neither of them know what he’s _like._ It’s been awhile since he’s done this, but… He grins and makes a private with himself as to how long it will take him before at least one of them snaps and tries to strangle him.

Actually, on second thought- why make a private wager when he’s got a partner to share the fun? He leans down to where Whisper is sharing a half-broken piece of wall at his shoulder and murmurs, “Ten caps says they don’t last a week.”

Whisper doesn’t bat an eyelash. “Double or nothing you can’t get both of them to go at the same time.”

_I love my life._ “Deal,” he says, and straightens away from the wall. “Hey new kids!” he says, and watches with a grin as the agents spin around with identical frowns on their faces. Oh, this is just too easy. “You’re with me, starting,” he looks at his bare wrist, “five minutes ago. Chop chop, don’t want to be late on your first day.”

“Who the hell are you?” the guy (caravan guard, came up on a coastal settlement to the south, did some time with one of the smaller merc gangs before he cashed out amicably) asks, after a startled moment. Deacon grins.

“Lesson number one: if you have to ask, you haven’t been paying attention.”

Off to the side, Glory groans and scrubs a palm over her face. “Maybe I can talk Dez out of this,” she says. “I forgot what a fuckin’ prick you are with new people.”

Whisper smirks and examines her nails. “Aw, partner, don’t tell me you’ve been going easy on me.”

“The way I hear it, he probably needs _you_ to take it easy on _him,_ ” Glory sighs. “Fixer, Doc-” Hmm. _Wonder which is which?_ “-this is Deacon. He runs most of our intel. That’s Whisper, the poor bastard who has to put up with him.”

“It’s the other way around really,” Whisper says. She’s managing to look particularly small and delicate today, and not at all like the woman who just last week climbed up the back of a super mutant behemoth in full berserk mode in order to slit his throat with a dagger since her gun got snapped in half. The new kids exchange confused glances, and Whisper’s smile suddenly sprouts a lot more teeth around the edges. “I’m much less friendly once you get to know me.”

“They’re going to be your supervisory agents for the next two weeks,” Glory continues, with a look that says, _Fuckin’ quit it._ (Deacon’s very familiar with that look.) “You’ve got three goals: don’t die, don’t fuck up, and for fuck’s sake don’t make me look bad. Think you can manage that?”

“Yes ma’am,” the woman (Doc? he'd wager Doc) says, causing Whisper’s affected yawn to turn into a cough of surprise.

“Where’d she pick that one up, the Brotherhood?” she says into his ear.

_The Gunners, actually,_ he thinks but doesn’t say. They’ve had more than their fair share of trouble with the Gunners, and people tend to hold grudges. Although, considering that word on the street put her as recruiting that ex-Gunner merc that used to hang around Goodneighbor, he doubts she’s likely to judge. Not that Whisper ever judges, as far as he can see, except for stupid people and sloppy work. They offend her (admittedly somewhat skewed) sense of professionalism.

“Like your tin soldiers are any better,” he whispers back. She gives him a shove for that one, and he rocks away obligingly and then back into the same position, shoulder-to-shoulder with her at the wall. When they look up all three heavies are staring at them.

“I should also add, try not to kill these two assholes,” Glory says dryly. “I admit it might be tempting.”

Deacon grins and puts on his shades. It’s all about knowing how to make your own fun, when it comes down to it. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

"Suuuure you don't." She looks over at Whisper. "Try to keep him in check, will you?"

Whisper slides out his spare pair of shades- son of a bitch, he didn't even notice her making that lift out of his pocket- and slides them onto her nose with the exact same twist of her wrist as him. _Damn, she's good._ "I don't know what you're talking about."

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

“So what,” Whisper asks him later, "is a supervisory agent supposed to do?"

"Follow my excellent example, obviously," Deacon says absently. They're perched on a fire escape a few miles away from HQ, watching Doc and Fixer work their way up to a super mutant base. (Doc _did_ turn out to be the woman, score one for Deacon. Fixer described himself as someone ‘known for fixing problems’ while patting his machete fondly, so that one might be a bit harder to wind up, but Deacon’s got high hopes for Doc. Too formal by half.)

“What example? I’ve been reliably informed that my training has been, and I quote: ‘the sort of slapdash, shoddy work I can expect out of the likes of him.’”

“Well, that’s what you get for talking to Carrington,” Deacon says, sparing her a grin before returning to his scope. In theory their ducklings are supposed to be sneaking in undetected to prove they know how, but Deacon’s feeling like Doc is adhering to the letter of the law rather than the spirit by killing any mutant that could possibly notice them with extreme prejudice aforehand. _Ah well, just means I can strike “creative interpretation of orders” off the list._ “It’s not complicated, hotshot. Point the kids at a few problems, see how they handle themselves in the field, make sure they’ve got a good idea of Railroad protocols before we let them off the leash. They’re Glory’s recruits so they go back to her for final assessment, thank fuck. All we have to do is make sure they’re at least somewhat capable of not running in with guns blazing, and that they don’t turn up their nose at some of the dirty work just ‘cause they think they’ve joined a True and Noble Cause.”

“...I can hear the capital letters in your voice, you know,” Whisper says, sounding amused. She nudges at him with her elbow, and he takes a moment to watch Fixer chop the arm clean off the super mutant making a spirited attempt to rip off Doc’s head before he hands over the rifle. “So wait, ‘final assessment?’ There’s _assessments?_ You never told me that.”

Yeah, and most people didn’t manage to actually find HQ, rather than the other way around. He hadn’t wanted to make her feel like she was on trial when they needed her help so fucking badly. It’s not like he’d had any doubts that she’d pass with flying colors- which, of course, she did. “What did you think the Switchboard was about, anyway?”

“You guys needing someone who knows one end of a rifle from the other.”

“Okay, _true,_ but it was also an ‘informal field assessment due to unusual circumstances,’” Deacon quotes, and shrugs. Without the rifle in his hands he doesn’t have anything better to do than look over at her, her cheek laid down against the stock as she squints into the scope, the setting sun painting brilliant reds and oranges into her dark brown hair. If he had any hand at all for art, he’d paint her just like this, call it “Promise of Destruction,” and sell it for a grand to some dumb fuck in the DC stands with more caps than sense. (And then steal it back, obviously. No sense in letting someone have it who wouldn’t be able to appreciate it.)

Whisper spares him a single sideways look, reeking of skepticism. “That sounds like bullshit.”

“Yeah, well, I’m told it’s my specialty.” That gets a grin, and he continues, “It’s not as weird as you’re making it sound. You already know I’d been on your tail for a few months already.”

“Yes, because that’s not weird at all.”

“It’s called being thorough, partner, you should try it sometime.” He knows she twigged him as a tail at least a couple of times, though they never talked about it much. He’s pretty sure that she didn’t notice him that last time in Bunker Hill, at least. He’d been looking in on her traveling companion as much as her, Glory wanting an update on G5-19 but not wanting to draw attention to herself, and Deacon watched Curie follow Whisper around the trade stalls like a kid in a candy store, watched Whisper laugh and smile and explain things with a seemingly bottomless well of patience- and he’d started trying to figure out how to make his approach. “I just wanted to work with you, make sure you lived up to the reputation. You did, so I wrote up something that sounded good, filed it with Drums, and moved on.”

And Dez had accepted it with a minimum of screaming, because that was Deacon’s job, and she had to let him get on with it because she wouldn’t have the first idea where to start getting anyone else to do it instead. They never know about his potential recruits until after he’s already presented them- opsec rules- and it’s not like they can afford to start distrusting his calls now. Whisper sort of presented _herself_ before Deacon got a chance to do it, which was unfortunate, but he’d done his homework on her and then some, and nobody could dispute the results.

Whisper snorts, bringing him back to the present. “Yeah, ‘cause that worked out so well. You remember Carrington’s face when I didn’t know what a dead drop was?”

“Yeah, but he’s an asshole.” Doc and Fixer are coming up on the gate now, and true to their word, the gate guard doesn’t notice anything amiss before Fixer’s throwing knife cuts open his carotid artery. On the other hand, they haven’t seemed to notice the suicider coming up behind them. Deacon would think the beeping alone would give it away. “So I didn’t go over the protocols first, what’s the problem? You learned on the job, and if you’ll recall, we were a _little_ shorthanded at the time. I wasn’t going to leave you hanging, but we had work to do.”

“Well _that_ hasn’t changed,” Whisper sighs. She shifts minutely to the left, lets out a slow breath, and squeezes the trigger. There’s a muffled _crack_ as the rifle kicks back, and the suicider falls down with a heavy thud, close enough that some of his brain matter lands on the ducklings. Doc turns and gives them a Look that Deacon can see even without the scope, but he’s pretty sure that Fixer is laughing. “So was I ever a probationary agent like them?”

“Not on your worst day,” Deacon says cheerfully, and opens up the comm line. “Not bad, kids. You made it to the other side! On the other hand, you almost got yourself and the entire building nuked back down to the Stone Age, so no cookies for you. Rendezvous at the camp and we’ll see if we can’t figure out a retry.”

“Harsh,” Whisper says, folding up the rifle and handing it back to him.

“I’m not grading on a curve.”

“True.” She grabs the railing and vaults over it, dangling in empty space for a moment before dropping into a light crouch on the pavement below. Deacon shakes his head and follows down the steps at a more reasonable pace, falling into step with her when he reaches the bottom. “So wait, if I’m a 'supervisory agent,' does that mean that I'm a full operative now?”

There's a fine thread of tension in her voice, and he's so distracted wondering where that comes from that it takes a long second for the actual words to percolate. When they do, he does a hop-skip to move up so he can walk backwards in front of her, all the better to stare her down.

She blinks. "What'd I say?"

"You've been working with us since December," he says gently, because he's a little concerned she took a hit to the head somewhere along the line and forgot to tell him. "During which time you've been running Railroad ops full-time, and I should know because I've done most of them with you."

She clears her throat and raises her chin. "So?"

"So what the hell did you think you were, if not a full operative?"

She shoves her hands into her pockets and shrugs. "I dunno," she says. The sun is sinking down behind her, and it's hard to see her eyes even with his shades, but she sounds a little defensive. "Having fun?”

"Well, take comfort in the fact that your career is assured," he tells her, because _holy fuck, you're perfect_ is probably inappropriate even by their hilariously lax standards. "Assuming our probies don't get us killed, that is."

"Ah, you're giving 'em too little credit," she says, but she looks a lot more amused and a lot less tense, now, so that's good. Mission accomplished, whatever that was about. "I was your probie and you're still alive, aren't you?"

"Yeah, but you're in a class all your own, kid," he drawls, just slow enough to sound insulting even though he means every word, and she laughs and throws him the bird.

"I think there was a compliment somewhere in all that condescension," she says, and swipes out a hand, grabs him by the collar of his jacket and tugs. "Get back over here, you're going to trip over something and then complain about the bruises on your knees all day."

"I don't know what you're talking about," he lies, and lets himself be dragged. He much prefers walking next to her anyway, even if it means he can't see her face, the familiar blood-warmth of her next to him comforting even in the baking, early summer heat. "And that was absolutely a compliment, no condescension required," he adds. Occasionally honest really _is_ the best policy, and it’s better than pointing out some of the other ways he could end up with bruises on his knees. _Two weeks till the kids are gone,_ he tells himself. He used to go months or longer without it. Before Whisper, it’d been almost two years since he last got his dick wet. Two weeks isn’t very long to wait.

"Well, _that'll_ be a first," she says, and then laughs and dances away when he goes to cuff the back of her head. She doesn't go far, though, and ducks back before his hand can drop, so his palm lands cupping the ball of her shoulder, warm and strong under his hand.

He gives it a squeeze, and they walk on.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The rest of June is spent running training scenarios- combat only, no undercover ops. There's no need for his kind of games with a pair of straight-shooters like them. The probies get a good rundown of the routes, codes, and handshake protocols, all from someone a little less inclined to be nice to them than Glory is, and Deacon gets to… Well. Deacon gets to fuck with them with impunity, and Whisper gets to watch and laugh, so both of _them_ are happy.

Technically, he wins the bet when he manages to goad Doc into reaching for her boot knife on day six, but Fixer grabs her wrist before she can actually get it unsheathed, so Whisper submits that it didn’t count. He counter-submits that the homicidal intent was clear, and she counter-counter-submits that close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades. They call that one a draw.

Although, Deacon _definitely_ didn’t manage to get both of them to go for it- he’s starting to think Fixer is biologically incapable of being anything but amused- so, point to her. Point to _him_ , he won the side bet they made on day three about which of them would make a try for him first if he couldn’t get both of them. So they’re back to a draw.

“No complaints from me,” Whisper says, late that night after the ducklings have gone to their bedrolls, Doc sullenly and Fixer still trying not to laugh. “If you have any ideas about how you want to pay it out this time, I’m all ears.”

“I’ve got a few thoughts,” he says, looking at the shadows the firelight paints on the points of her collarbones, the hollows of her throat. “I did promise you something with a little more finesse last time, if I recall.”

She grins at him. “I also recall you delivering on that promise once already.”

So does he. Deacon clears his throat and takes a sip from his canteen. “Either way, it’ll have to wait till we’re off babysitting duty.”

“Another week left,” she agrees, and gives him a grin so insinuating that the back of his neck goes hot.

Deacon mostly lets Whisper take point, in spite of a few exasperated glares about how _she_ doesn’t know what she’s doing either, because it’s a lot more interesting (and useful) to hang back and watch how they interact with someone else in charge rather than having them look to him. Plus, she’s technically a heavy like them. At some point, they’re going to end up on an op together, and he wants to make sure that when that happens, they’ll be willing to follow her lead.

And Whisper does just fine- more than fine, really, which he’d known she would. First, because if Whisper has something she’s less than excellent at she’s been careful to keep him from seeing it, and second, because he’s been following her lead for six months and things have been working out pretty damn well, so what’s the problem? He has to carefully correct a couple of stumbles on some of the finer points of Railroad protocol, but the probies don’t seem to notice and he never has to tell her anything twice. He doesn’t know why she’s worrying so much.

Day thirteen, Drums sends them a runner to let them know someone was spotted at the Randolph dead drop, conveniently just in time for a graduating exercise. Whisper leaves them in Bunker Hill and makes the run for the dead drop on her own, and when she comes back again she picks up some extra supplies and starts taking them east.

“Where to, boss?” Deacon says, and when she just gives him a lazy smirk instead of an answer, he does a little stutter-step to close in behind her and step on her heel.

"Hey!" she says, and he has to duck fast when she sends a not-so-feigned punch at the side of his head. Still plenty slow enough for him to get away, though. " _Jerk._ "

"That's way below your usual standards of witty repartee," he says, and doesn't bother to duck this time when she growls and swipes at him, because she just hooks her arm around his neck and drags him in, and _that's_ not a thing he's planning to complain about anytime soon. "Is this your counter-argument? Because if so…"

"If you wanted my attention," she says into his ear, "you just had to _ask._ "

A pleasant shiver runs down his spine. "I don't know what you're talking about," he says innocently, glancing up ahead to make sure that the ducklings are far enough up that they won't be overheard. "All I was looking for was a little exchange of information."

"Oh, is that it," she says, and then the hand on his shoulder shifts slightly and he can feel the edge of her thumbnail teasing at the hollow behind his ear. That is- That is entirely unfair. "I see how it is. You just want me for my intel."

There's a pleasant heat flushing down to his belly now, and this is stupid, this is _so stupid,_ but it turns out putting your sex drive on hold is a lot easier when you're not sleeping next to a willing partner with only your own shaky sense of professionalism to hold you back. Travel doesn't exactly offer up a lot of opportunities for a private moment to jerk off, either, which doesn't fucking help.

"I dunno, partner, you're useful for a lot of things," he murmurs back. "I for one have a great appreciation for your natural leadership abilities."

"I'd be happy to give you a hands-on demonstration of those, anytime." She dimples up at him, and his gaze snags on the curve of her lower lip. "And hey, you're not too shabby yourself. If you're looking for a chance to exercise leadership capabilities in the field, I'm happy to.... guide you in some practical applications."

He can't help but picture what those practical applications might entail. "I appreciate your willingness to switch things up for the sake of unit cohesion."

"You got it," she says, and gives the back of his neck a squeeze before sliding away. He shoots a fast glance up ahead, but the probies are still too focused on the road ahead to be paying any attention to their supervisory agents dawdling behind. "Just got to get the kids through this one last mission first."

"It's a date," he drawls. "What are we up to, anyway?"

"Unknown," she says, with a shrug. "Mission parameters are just to clean out the area. Not sure what's waiting for us, but- here." She flicks him her notebook, already open to the last page with her coded transcription of the holotape. "That's where we're going."

_University Point._

Fuck.

“You okay there, D?” she asks, hovering somewhere between amused and concerned. “You looked a little green for a minute.”

_Of course I fucking did._ “It’s the main Institute base on the coast,” he murmurs back. The warmth in his belly is fading fast, with a cold sort of sickness taking its place. “Heavy resistance.”

“Even for us?”

“Even for us.”

She glances up at the ducklings, and back to him. “I’ll keep that in mind,” she says, and moseys on up ahead, her clever brain already working overtime on a plan of attack. He ducks his head and falls in at her heels, glad all over again that she's with him, that he can leave this one to her.

_University fucking Point._ It’s not often that Deacon thinks about the ol’ homestead, and why the fuck would he? It’s been almost thirty years since he left, and he didn’t exactly have much in the way of family around before he got out, either. The only people left who knew his name before were the Deathclaws, and there weren’t any of them left when he was done with them. It’s just a place- not even a town anymore, not since the Institute moved in looking for who the hell knows what. That was three years ago, and it’s been an Institute stronghold ever since. There’s nothing left there for him to know.

And honestly, if he stresses out about _anything_ on this mission, it should be taking two probationary heavies into a rough combat situation with not enough intel and too many goddamn Gen 2s making a spirited attempt at murdering the shit out of them. That’s enough to make anyone go a little green around the gills.

Except. Except, except, except. Except it’s Whisper’s hand on the helm, so he knows it’ll go smooth. Which means that’s not enough to justify the tension coiling at the top of his spine, the creeping sense of dread that follows him as they make their entrance into the stronghold. Fuck.

“Trust me,” Whisper tells him, while Doc and Fixer are getting into position, and he reaches out to give her arm a fast, silent squeeze, because he can’t get the words past the lump in his throat to say _that was never the problem._

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

It goes- if not exactly _smoothly,_ at least _well,_ he decides. One of the lookouts manages to spot them on the last floor up and it turns into a bit of a firefight, but when it’s over the Gen 2s are dead and they’re not, so it’s a win however you look at it. Fixer caught a burn to his shoulder from one of the laser rifles, but if they’re taking on a full pack of Gen 2s in an entrenched location and that’s the worst injury they have to worry about, they’ve done pretty damn well. Doc lives up to her codename and gets him patched up while Deacon drags the bodies into a heap in the corner for later sweep and retrieve. Whisper sets them up a camp of sorts on the least-destroyed office on the top floor, pushing furniture in front of the windows to hide the light from the little camp stove and getting dinner started.

_Okay,_ Deacon thinks. The routine of combat, Whisper’s voice in his ear, and the familiar kick of his rifle in his hands drove away most of the cobwebs, and he’s feeling enough himself again to go back to Plan A. _Not too bad so far. Let’s go for the final round._

After dinner’s over, Deacon pulls out the bottle of whiskey he picked up in Bunker Hill for this very purpose. Doc eyes it a bit distrustfully- smart girl- but she holds out her cup alongside Fixer when Deacon gets ready to pour. Deacon swallows his grin ( _suckers_ ) and fakes taking a shot in order to get the ducklings to follow suit. Whisper, on watch near the window with her rifle in her arms, turns her head but not before he can see the smirk tug on the corner of her lips.

After a couple hours, the bottle’s pretty much empty and only a couple slugs of it are in his belly, so it seems the best time to make his move. “Okay, graduation night confessional, gather ‘round,” he says. Fixer and Doc drunkenly huddle a little closer, casting curious sideways glances at Whisper, who doesn’t move. “She’s on watch, she doesn’t have to play,” he says, and pours all three of them one last round. “Tonight we’re playing ‘why I joined the Railroad.’ Fixer, you first.”

Doc gives him a slow, confused frown and before Fixer can reply, says, “Why does it matter?”

It doesn’t. Deacon already knows why they’re here, what pinged them onto his radar as a tourist, what qualities they demonstrated that caused Glory to put them up as heavies. Anything he didn’t find out first hand is in their file, and you can be damn sure he reviewed it before he put his stamp on them coming into HQ. But while Deacon isn’t going through the dozens of lessons Whisper never needed him to teach her anyway, he’s got at least one up his sleeve for the new kids before he releases them into the wild. A gift, if you will, from him to them. Whether or not they appreciate it is up to them.

“Because we need to trust that you’re here for a reason, that you won’t just turn on us at the first chance,” Deacon says, with the brutal honesty of someone who’s seen it happen again and again and again. “There’s a lot of lives on the line. We need to know that you can hold it. Fix?”

“Sure thing,” Fixer says, but the now-familiar slow, easy cant to his voice is belied by the way he rolls his cup between his big palms. “Saw a lot of shit, walkin’ the roads. Raiders, ferals, mirelurks, even a deathclaw once. But one time we got hit by a pair of coursers. They were after a merc that was riding shotgun with us, new kid, apparently got a tip that he was a runaway. Took out half my caravan before they got to him, only when they did they said some kind of mumbo-jumbo and it didn’t do a damn thing. Assholes got the wrong fucking target. Shot him and left him dead in the road, half my people with him. And I figured- anyone who fucks with those guys, you know. I’m down with that. What if that poor kid _had_ been a synth? Jesus fuck, anyone who can shoot someone in the head like that, cold blood- that’d have to be worse than death, man. So.” He heaves his massive shoulders into a shrug. “Here I am.”

It’s a good story. It’s even mostly true. He’s leaving out the part where he survived the courser attack because he put down his weapon and hid behind one of the pack brahmin, but a) that’s honestly the sensible thing to do when you’ve got a courser nearby, and b) Deacon’s not about to jab the poor bastard for it, when the guilt over it clearly sent him right into the Railroad’s waiting arms. He’s generally immune to a sense of hypocrisy, but there’s limits.

“Good man,” he says, and turns to Doc. “Your turn.”

Even drunk as she is, she looks miserably uncomfortable with their scrutiny. “I wanted to do something that mattered,” she mutters, hunching down her shoulders. “I heard one of Desdemona’s tapes and I- had no one, so. It seemed. Fitting.”

Deacon nods sympathetically, biting back his smile. She couldn’t have given him a better opening if she’d hand-written an invitation herself. “It’s probably better that way,” he says. “I know it doesn’t seem it now, but- When the Switchboard went down, a lot people didn’t just lose their comrades, they lost their families. In this business, it’s easier to just fly solo.”

Doc swallows and looks away. Fixer looks like he wants to put a hand to her shoulder, but lets it drop before he can make contact and turns a heavy, drunken stare back to Deacon. “Oh yeah? You one of the ones who lost someone?”

“Me? Nah, I don’t have any family. They don’t exactly come standard-issue when you’re printed out by the Institute.”

There’s a slight rustle as Whisper shifts position, and he can feel her gaze suddenly boring holes in the back of his head. She doesn’t say anything, though, just gives a little huff of a laugh that means that whether or not she approves of his play, she at least finds it amusing enough to go along with it. And really, what more can you ask from a partner?

Now, Doc and Fixer are pretty drunk, yeah, but they didn’t get recruited because they’re stupid. (All appearances to the contrary, in Fixer’s case.) “You’re a synth?” he asks.

“That’s what they tell me,” Deacon says, with false cheer. “I was one of the first ones to get the ol’ cranium reboot and it was a learning experience for everyone. Makes me quirky and fun that way.”

From behind him, he’s pretty sure he hears Whisper mutter, “Yeah, _that’s_ the reason,” but he pretends he hasn’t heard.

“Oh,” Doc says. “That’s, uh. Rough.”

Deacon shrugs. “Wouldn’t know,” he says. “Besides, I think it’s more of an advantage, you know? No family means no leverage. For Glory and me, and the others-” No need to let them get cocky, think they have everyone figured out. “-it’s easier to dedicate ourselves to the cause. Means we have nothing to lose.”

He’s particularly aware of Whisper behind him when he says it, the weight of her stare, the familiar steady rhythm of her breathing. Nope, not thinking about it. Not now, hopefully not ever.

“Thanks for telling us, man,” Fixer says, and Deacon ducks his head to hide a smile. He’d like to think that he was never that gullible, but hey- they’re sitting in his hometown. History says otherwise, even if nobody else is left to remember it.

“Look, since we’re going to be working together from now on, I wanted you to have this.” He reaches into his pocket, letting his fingers fumble against the fabric clumsily for a minute before he pulls out a scrap of paper. “It’s my recall code. If you ever need to know something about the institute, read it to me.” He pauses with it halfway into Doc’s hand and holds up one finger cautiously. “Only for dire emergencies, okay? You use that and I’m gone. Possibly forever if Amari can’t pull a restore.”

“Oh,” Doc says. “Are you sure you-”

“Yeah, you should have it,” he says, heavy with drunken seriousness. “You’re playing in the big leagues now. We’ve gotta have some trust, right?”

Doc blinks, owl-like. Man. _Way_ too easy. “Right.”

“Good.” He lets go of the paper and sits back with a thump. “Thanks.”

Behind him, Whisper starts chuckling. Deacon sighs. Must she? Must she, really?

“What is it?” Fixer asks, and Deacon can _hear_ the smirk in her voice when she says, “Read the code.”

“Uh,” Fixer says.

“Trust me,” Whisper says, with no small amount of irony in her voice. “Read the code.”

Doc unfolds it, and, with a hilariously tentative glance in his direction, reads it out loud. “‘You can’t trust everyone.’”

“Ah!” Deacon flails and falls backwards onto the floor, twitching. Watching the panicked look on Doc’s face out of the corner of his eye and trying not to laugh. “Oh no- erk- argh-” Whisper’s gentle throat-clearing interrupts his show, and Deacon props himself up on his elbows and lets his head loll back, grinning upside-down at her. “It’s a classic for a reason, partner.”

“You _lied?_ ” Doc says, sounding betrayed, and Deacon sits the rest of the way up to look at them. Doc’s looking at him like he just stomped on all her hopes and dreams in front of her, which is cute, but Fixer just has a heavy, flat look. Not sure how he feels about it, that one. “Why would you lie about that?” _To us,_ is the implied ending to that statement. Aw. They got attached!

“Don’t take it so personal,” Deacon says, more or less kindly. Some people take this part harder than others. (Whisper’s the only one who ever truly seemed to be unbothered by it.) “It’s what I do.”

This is met with a pair of unhappy looks, and he sighs. Kids these days, honestly. “Look, I’m supposed to be showing you the ropes in the Railroad, so consider this your final lesson from me. The most important one. Okay?”

Doc tilts her chin belligerently. “And what lesson is that?”

“That the code I gave you is the hard truth. You can’t trust everyone. Even if someone sounds sincere, they could be a synth replacement working for the Institute.”

“Is that really-”

“Yes,” Deacon says, before Fixer has a chance to finish, and if his voice sounds heavy he’s not faking it this time. “It’s happened more times than you know. However powerful you think the Institute is, it’s far, far worse than you can imagine.”

There’s a little pool of silence before Fixer clears his throat. “So what’s your point?”

“The point is, learn to trust your judgement. Ninety percent of the time, someone’s on the up-and-up. The bitch of the problem is recognizing that ten percent of the time you’re being played. Out of that, less than a half of a percent is going to be life-threatening. You’ve got to learn the difference if you want to survive in this biz.” He takes his shot of whiskey- fuck it, he’s earned it- and flips the cup upside-down next to the empty bottle. “Here endeth the lesson.”

It’s a sullen pair of probies who finish their drinks and curl up around the fire, a few minutes later, but Deacon just smiles and leaves them to it. Either the lesson will stick or it won’t, and they’ll either live to see another day, or they won’t. This job doesn’t exactly guarantee a long life span at the best of times, but he’s done his part in getting them to figure out the basics. Whether or not it takes is up to them.

He goes to take a piss, detouring to pick up his spare pistol when Whisper gives him a warning look, and returns unassaulted to find the ducklings either asleep or doing a damn good job faking it. Whisper’s still posted up near the window, with that perfect waiting stillness only a true sniper can achieve. Deacon knows from experience that she can hold it for hours if need be, never moving a muscle, and then explode into violent action when you least expect it. The moonlight picks out strands of silver in her dark hair, but her eyes fall into shadow, only the edges of her cheekbones and the curve of her lips catching the light.

_Promise of Destruction, Part II,_ Deacon thinks, and commits it to memory. It’s the little things that can get you through the rough days, and he knows with the weary certainty of an old sailor that there’s rough times ahead. It’s been too quiet for too long, and Deacon doesn’t trust it. There’s a storm on the horizon. He just doesn’t know when it’s going to hit.

Or how.

“Hey,” he says, coming up behind her. He puts his hands on her shoulders, feeds her a little of his warmth against the chill of the ocean air, and she relaxes into his grip.

“Hey yourself,” she says. Her voice is low and husky, from the hour or just trying not to wake the others, he’s not sure. “Are you officially done fucking with the new kids?”

“Yeah, I think I’ve about made my point.”

“The rest is up to them,” she agrees. _Always nice to be on the same wavelength._ “Though you got a bit dramatic there at the end, bucko.”

“Hey, what can I say. Sometimes you gotta sell it, and sometimes you gotta _oversell_ it.” He kneads her shoulders, looking absently out the window. This high up, they’ve got an unimpeded view of the ocean, and there’s just enough moon out that he can see the choppy foam of the waves, white against the black dangerous depths of the sea. “You know, I can see why you picked this spot.”

“View’s not bad,” she agrees. “Though if you like this, you should see it from the battlements of the Castle. It’s just a bit out onto a peninsula, and if you face the right way there’s nothing but ocean, as far as the eye can see. It’s great.”

“Yeah?” He lets his hands move up to her neck, and she leans back into them with a sigh as he starts working on the long muscles that feed down into her shoulders. She carries her tension there, just like him. “Didn’t take you for a seaside girl.”

“I was born near the sea,” she says absently. Her gaze is still fixed on the horizon. “It gets in your blood.”

Deacon looks down at her profile, the cupid’s-bow of her lip, the upward tweak of her button nose, the dimple that flirts at the corner of her mouth: all much more familiar, now, then his own face in the mirror. It’s better than looking out the window, where he can see the crumpled outlines of the house he was born in, the little garden plots he used to work on weekday afternoons after class was out, the market stalls where he used to browse and practice picking pockets, the bar he where he used to sneak off and get drunk with his buddies, the balcony where- All gone now. All gone. “So I’m told. Is that why you lot resettled the Castle?”

“Well, I think it had more to do with the radio tower and the big-ass stores of guns, but sure,” she says, smiling. “The view didn’t hurt.”

This view does. “You should show me sometime.”

“I thought you didn’t like the Minutemen,” she says with a snort.

“Rednecks with guns, what’s not to like?” He lets his hands fall still over her shoulders, his fingers splayed over her collarbones. Warmth hums down his spine, in contrast to the sickness in his belly. He doesn’t want to be here anymore. “How about tomorrow?”

She twists to look back up at him, the stray curls at the back of her head brushing against his shirt. He can’t read her expression at all, but he just waits, letting the tension wind tighter in his chest. If he could always predict her, he’d have gotten bored a long time ago. “I thought we were still on babysitting duty.”

“If they can’t get back on their own, they’re not much use to us as heavies, are they?” He slides one cupped hand up over her throat, relishes the pleased smile that curls the corner of her lips. Such a damn cat sometimes, is his partner. Likes being stroked, high places, sunlight, and hunting at night. _Plus, there's the way you never see the claws till you’re already bleeding._ “Besides. Maybe I want you to myself for a bit.”

She swallows, and he can feel it against his palm, the bob of her adam’s apple and the way the muscles work. “Is that so?”

“Well,” he says, and closes his hand just slightly, just enough that she can feel the pressure. Even in the dark and with the color of her skin, he can see the flush riding high on her cheekbones. “We still have to work out that draw, you and I.”

“Mmm, that’s true. And I believe I promised you some hands-on demonstration of leadership skills, not so long ago." She brings up her gun hand, calloused and rough with tiny nicks and long-healed scars, and clamps it over his larger one. Her fingers squeeze tighter over his, and her head lolls back against his belly, causing heat to flare out from the point of contact. His rabbiting heart rate settles into the same slow, measured throb he can feel under his palm. "How's the lesson so far?"

Her voice is tight from their combined grip, and his awareness collapses down to her dark eyes, the pupils blown so wide they look almost black in the low lighting. The crash of the ocean waves fades into a dull roar in the distance, and he can feel the heat burning high on his cheeks. He feels like he's trembling on a wire, high in the air with no safety net. He feels like her pulse under his hand is more dangerous than any live grenade.

"Looking forward to the rest of it, partner," he says hoarsely. "You just lead the way."


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’m so sorry this took so long for me to post, y’all. It was going through some fairly rigorous final edits and then I got married. So that was distracting. However, I am back! And those of you who’ve been reading ahead on my tumblr should see another part or two posted in the next week.

June folds over into July, unnoticed save for some complaints about the heat, all thought of the calendar drowned out by the sheer volume of work they’re all under. It’s a bad month for the Institute, because Patriot gets six, count ‘em _six_ new packages out to Old Man Stockton, and Deacon and Whisper spend three straight weeks running non-stop patrols and intel sweeps, trying like hell to keep the roads clear and everyone’s head above water. Thank fuck for Doc and Fixer, or they’d all be up shit creek. As it is, he and Whisper are so fucking run down that even when they’re not playing escort they don’t seem to have the energy to do more than give each other the occasional tired handjob, stifling hoarse moans against each other’s throat and jaw and mouth, not even bothering to shuck out of their gear any more than absolutely necessary to get their pants open.

They sleep like that, too, squirmed down into a single bedroll in defiance of the midsummer heat, bits of armor poking each other in uncomfortable places and limbs tangled together in the too-tight space. He gets to used the weight of her against his chest in the night, to falling asleep with his nose pressed into her hair, the astringent smell of the powder she uses to keep clean on the road chasing him down into his dreams. She wakes him up sometimes with her nightmares, reaching for her blade in the middle of the night, and once she almost cuts his finger off when he tries to grab it from her in half-asleep reflex. Another time, they get ambushed by a fucking yao gui on the road when he falls asleep on night watch and it’s only her quick reflexes that allow her to get her gun up and a bullet into the thing’s skull before it can chomp Deacon’s face clean off. The ensuing fight over _that_ debacle lasts for almost half an hour, both of them covered in blood and brain matter and screaming at each other while they attempt to scrub up near the water’s edge, until Whisper gets fed up and shoves him backwards into the pond, still fully dressed. He yanks her in after him, and _both_ of them end up having to use up some of their precious store of radaway after how long they spend in the water.

(Two hundred percent worth it.)

Fun aside, the rest of the work doesn’t exactly go away just because they’ve got extra packages on ice, nice as _that_ would be. They’re stable enough that some of the more proactive intel work can go on hold for a month or so with nothing more than a few words in the right ears to keep things moving, but they have to maintain opsec on the standard defensive measures. It wouldn’t be the first time that the Institute let something slip just to set them up to fail, and Deacon fully intends to be prepared if that's the case. But with all the running around they’re doing, it’s all he can do to keep the intel chains moving, keep the reports moving back to HQ for processing. Common sense dictates that he should delegate, hand Whisper off to Glory and let the two of them raise a little hell while he focuses on his own work, but he can’t. He just can’t.

“You can’t keep this up,” Whisper tells him, when she catches him writing reports about four hours after he was supposed to go to sleep. “Don’t glare at me, I’m being honest. You wouldn’t have fallen asleep on watch if you weren’t trying to do too much.”

He’s not entirely sure if his flush is from being caught when he’s supposed to be asleep, being reminded of his fuckup last week, or being reminded of what happened after. Either way, he’s grateful for the low light that hides it. Damned ginger complexion. 

When in doubt, deflect. “You know, coming from you-”

“Yes, I get it, I’m a hypocrite, let’s move on,” she says impatiently. He spares a moment to be annoyed about how she just straight-up ignores his bullshit these days. _Got to get some new material._ “Look, most of these patrols don’t require what you’d call a lot of planning ahead of time. HQ is handling the defensive coordination, all I’ve got to do is go where they point me.”

“If you’re saying you don’t need me on these-”

“Don’t be stupid.” He glares at her for the interruption and bites down on the smile that wants to spring up at her blithe denial. “All I’m saying is, maybe let your partner lend a hand, yeah?” She gives a rueful smile, just a shade off correct. “I’m not really doing what you’d call pulling my weight at the moment.”

There’s a little quake of strain in her voice, despite her best efforts to keep it light, and he takes a minute to stop and think about it from her perspective. He’s been working like hell to make sure that she won’t try to leave him behind, but- Whisper likes to feel useful. It’s probably one of the first things he learned about her when they started working together. She’s usually scrupulously careful of her perceived boundaries over his work, never tries to step into something unless he invites her. For her to offer- well, she’s probably been sitting there gritting her teeth for weeks, waiting for him to ask, until she just couldn’t take it anymore.

_Deacon, you fucking idiot._ “There’s some stuff I can’t read you in on,” he cautions.

“No, obviously. I didn’t mean-”

“But I could use the help,” he interrupts, and enjoys the way she glares at him for it. Turnabout, fair play, etc. “Look, here’s where I need to be in the next three days,” he says, and she thumps down to the bedroll next to him. “You know where we need to hit for the patrol. Get me to these places on the way, and I can worry about the rest.”

She hooks her chin over his shoulder, the better to read the report. Even out of the corner of his eye, he can see the relief in her grin. “Partner, you have got yourself a deal.”

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

After that, it gets easier. All he has to do is tell her where they need to go, and she never asks who, or how, or why: she just gets them there and makes sure they stay in one piece. All Deacon has to do is send his reports and shoot in a straight line when she tells him to. In some ways, it’s one of the least stressful times he’s had in the last couple of years. _Life is so much simpler,_ he thinks, _when you can make someone else take the reins._ Too bad there’s so few people that can be trusted with them.

But all good things must come to an end, as the saying goes. It comes to a head when when they run the final package down and out the southeast corridor and find themselves dogged by Institute patrols the entire fucking way. No coursers, thank fuck, or they’d all be dead in the water, but the Gen 2s are plenty bad enough. (He’d lay good odds on him and Whisper against a courser, generally- _if_ they’re well-rested, _if_ they’re in good health, and _if_ they don’t have civilians to protect, none of which apply here. They’d be fucked.)

It’s bad enough that he’s pretty sure the Institute has managed to set up another base somewhere on the coast already- somewhere he doesn’t know about, fuck it all to hell. And while they’re not targeted enough to have an actual mole in their ranks, they _are_ persistent enough to have at least a very observant third party who’s starting to pick up some of the usual faces, and extrapolated the routes from there. They’re going to have to do some major reshuffling after this is over.

By the time they see the package out of the Commonwealth it's been three days and they have, collectively between the two of them: six hours of sleep, three servings of cold rations (they split the last one), one broken wrist, two cases of mild radiation poisoning, and one open wound. Not on her face, thank fuck; neither of them can afford either the attention a scar like that would bring or the time to get a surgery to clean it up, but taking a mirelurk claw to her shooting shoulder isn't a vast improvement. It’s not like he’s doing much better; the wrist he broke when he got (literally) kicked off his sniper’s perch was his gun hand. All the splinting in the world doesn't do him any favors when it comes to a rifle's kickback.

Looking back on it, he's not entirely sure how they make it back to HQ in one piece. He vaguely remembers them deciding that they need to get back and report in about the synth patrols as soon as possible, but in retrospect that decision seems a little suspect, judging by the expression Drums makes when they stumble down the back tunnel. Deacon remembers his report to Dez a little more clearly, if only because Deacon swiped a stimcell when Carrington was working on Whisper’s shoulder, but those don't last long. And when they wear off, it hits you harder than ever.

"Go get some sleep, Deacon," Dez says kindly, when he starts to list sideways on his stool. Whisper had her debrief first, while Carrington set and splinted his wrist, and she got sent off to get some sleep half an hour ago. Deacon's wishing he had the common sense to follow her when she went, and to hell with the report. "You two did excellent work. We can get the rest of the report tomorrow."

"No argument from me, boss," Deacon says, and salutes sloppily before sliding off the stool and stumbling off to find an open bunk. After ten minutes he hasn't had any luck- they'll be running a full house for a while, till some of the heat dies down- but on his second pass he spots a familiar mop of dark hair sticking out from the end of a blanket roll in one of the back rooms.

He only hesitates for a moment before he shucks his boots and drops gracelessly down to the mattress beside her. Everyone learns to double up when they have to down here. It won’t seem suspicious.

She makes an inarticulate grumbling noise at the intrusion that he refuses to admit is adorable, which promptly graduates into a full-blown growl when he starts tugging the ends of the blanket out of its tight wrap. Deacon considers leaving her to it, but it’s fucking cold down here in the tunnels, a couple layers of stone enough to keep the summer heat at bay, so he resumes his careful excavation. She growls again, warningly, but when he drops his face to the crook of her neck and murmurs, "It's me," she sighs and lets go. Generous, that.

He gets under the blanket with a minimum of fuss and wraps himself around her back like a clinging vine, the only way the two of them can fit on the tiny mattress. Which is what he plans to point out if anyone mentions it. Whisper sighs and burrows back against him, and he distantly notes the heat coming off her skin before he drops down into sleep.

He’s woken by the insistent nudge of a boot between his shoulderblades, which is not the happiest wake-up call he’s ever had, but when he manages to get his face out of Whisper’s sweat-damp curls and roll over, it’s just Glory standing over him, looking amused.

“You two are adorable,” she says, low-voiced enough that he knows most of the others aren’t awake yet. “When’s the wedding?”

_Fuck._ “Sometime after ‘die in a fire,’” he says, scrubbing a hand over his face. He’s not awake enough to do damage control. Does he even have to do damage control? Glory could just be being an asshole. “What the hell time is it?”

“Oh six hundred, jackass,” Glory says cheerfully. Normally he’d be annoyed at how clearly she’s enjoying his misery, but at the moment he’s too relieved that she doesn’t seem to be pursuing that line of teasing any further. _Thank fuck._ “Dez needs you.”

He glances back over his shoulder. Whisper’s still dead to the world. “You-singular or you-plural?”

“Both of you,” Glory clarifies. “It’s about the synth patrols.”

“Of course it is.” He struggles up to a sitting position, wincing as he lands on his bad hand. Carrington’s splint is still holding, and the stimpaks he got have worked their magic, but it’ll still be tender for a day or two yet. His own fault for continuing to shoot with a broken wrist, as the doc so waspishly informed him, but what the hell was he supposed to do, lie down and let the Institute take him? “Give me ten.”

“Got it.”

_Go big or go home._ “And for the love of God, if you want us functional you better have something for us to eat.”

“Not your fuckin’ maid, Deacon,” Glory says over her shoulder, but it’s with the particular flavor of belligerence that means she’s going to do it anyway. Good enough.

He scrubs a hand over the top of his head- holy shit, does he ever need to shave- and nudges Whisper with one elbow. “Rise and shine, sleeping beauty. Our presence is required at the palace.”

“F’k’ff,” comes the muttered response from beneath the blanket, and Deacon grins, ridiculously charmed. She’s not a morning person at the best of times, but she’s generally a bit better at faking it, a skill clearly developed in response to some long-ago comrade or sibling good at taking advantage of a weakness. It’s actually kind of cute to have finally succeeded at getting her to grumble and curse at him over it. “Sleepin’.”

“Yeah, no kidding, hotshot. But Dez needs us.” He slaps one thigh, or probably-thigh, through the blanket. “C’mon, up.”

The head that pokes up through the huddle of blankets is sleep-mussed and too-pale, her eyes bloodshot behind the glare she’s giving him. “Why.”

“Ours is not to reason why, ours is but to do or die.” A little concerned now, he reaches out and puts the back of his hand to her forehead. “You okay there, partner?”

“‘m _fine,_ ” she says, swatting his hand away irritably, but not before he registers the damp heat pouring off her skin.

He frowns down at her. Sure, he noticed she was a little warm the past couple of days, but they were moving hard and it’s the middle of summer; of course she’d be overheated, he was too. Maybe if they’d bunked down for more than twenty minutes at time before last night he might have noticed earlier, but it’s a little harder to miss now that he’s no longer cross-eyed from exhaustion. She looks like hell, which is not something he can normally say about a woman this attractive, and he doesn’t think it’s just the last few days that are to blame.

“What,” she says.

“I have to say, you’ve looked better.” He puts his hand to her forehead again- she glares at him, but doesn’t try to knock his hand away this time- and there’s no denying it. She definitely has a fever. “And you’re burning up. Carrington patched you up yesterday, he’d’ve said if you had an infection, right?”

“Oh, that,” she says.

He raises his eyebrows. At least she’s not going to try and play stupid. “Yes, that?”

She hunches her shoulders down defensively. “No. Just run down is all. It’s fine.”

“Gonna have to disagree with you on that one, pal.” He strokes one stray curl off her forehead and tucks it back behind her ear, using the opportunity to brush his fingers against the pulse behind her jaw. It’s a little on the fast side. Judging from her murderous look, he wasn’t as subtle about it as he thought he was.

“I’m _fine._ ”

She’s clearly not fine. And usually a better liar. “Look, it’s not a problem. We’ve been running hard for weeks, it’s not like you’re not due for a break. I’ll just tell Dez to take you off the roster for a few days and-”

“No,” she growls, and starts struggling up to a sitting position. The way her teeth are bared keeps him from putting a hand out to help her, but it’s hard to watch. Jesus, she’s weak as a kitten. “I’m good. I just need some sleep is all.”

“You’re clearly-”

“You don’t need to bench me.”

_Is that what this is all about?_ “First of all, I’m not benching anyone, I’m not your boss,” he says, because _priorities,_ “and second of all, it’s not _benching_ if you’re taking time to heal up from-”

“ _No,_ ” she says again, no less vehemently. “I can handle it. C’mon.”

“It’s not about-” He stops. Lets out a long, slow breath. _You had to know this was coming at some point,_ he tells himself. _Nobody entirely stable ever joins a secret underground organization. It was just a matter of time before some bout of crazy made it to the surface._ “Okay. I’ll talk to Dez, find us some light duty-”

“I don’t need-”

“-because _both of us_ are worn to shit,” Deacon finishes, talking over her, “and we need a break. Nobody will question it.”

There’s a wary sort of gratitude that breaks over her face then, and Deacon’s going to think about how that makes him feel approximately on the dark side of never. “You sure you-”

“I’m sure you should shut up and go back to sleep,” he says, more or less pleasantly. She huffs in something that only looks like annoyance but doesn’t argue, because sometimes when you’re very good miracles _can_ happen.

Deacon gives a fast glance in either direction to make sure they’re unobserved, then leans down and brushes a kiss across her too-hot forehead. When he leans back she has her eyes closed and a tiny smile on her lips.

“I’ll swipe you some stimpaks,” he says. “And breakfast. Get some rest and we’ll move out this afternoon.”

“Roger, Roger,” she says, and leans in faster than he can react, brushes a return kiss across his mouth. “Thanks.”

“Maybe say your thanks with less chance of contagion, next time,” he says, with an exasperation he doesn’t feel. She snorts at him and curls back up under the blankets.

“Yeah, because _that’s_ the thing that’s gonna get you sick from me. Face it, pal, if I have it you have it.”

“Your generosity is touching,” he says dryly. “And I mean that, by the way, literally touching, since that’s why I’m going to be just as diseased as you are in a couple days-”

She cracks open one eye. “Weren’t you supposed to be getting me breakfast?”

“Rude,” he remarks, and taps one finger gently on her temple. “I’m already gone.”

But he sits there, for just a moment more. Just 'cause.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Dez accepts his glib explanation about “leaving sleeping dogs lie” with little more than a raised eyebrow, and beckons him down for a more thorough debrief than he was able to give last night. He’s able to give Whisper’s more combat-oriented impressions as well, which had been exchanged in low voices on the road back to HQ while trying desperately not to fall asleep on their feet. And then after _that_ part of the debrief is done, they call in Carrington and start working out how to move some of their existing tourists. Everyone’s in agreement that the runners working along the southern route are going to have to be rotated out, but Dez thinks that they need to bolster their numbers in Bunker Hill, Carrington wants some more boots on the ground in Diamond City, and Deacon is just sitting there with his head in his hands because how can such nominally intelligent people be so _stupid?_

“Okay, no,” he finally says, when he it seems like they’re not going to wind down or talk themselves out of it anytime soon. As entertaining as it’s been, watching the power struggle between those two over the last couple of years, sometimes it verges on the ridiculous. They make for a fairly balanced team, but sometimes they need someone to talk them back from the brink when they get into it a little too heavy to take a look at the big picture. “If they’ve twigged to any of our runners, which they obviously have, the last place we want to send them is into a city where we have a lot of delicate operations and more Institute spies than we can shake a stick at. Or worse! Right to our alpha site.”

“That’s not your call to make,” Carrington says heatedly, but while Deacon _does_ enjoy their usual song and dance about whose is bigger, it’s not the best play right now, so he just leans back and tilts up his chin to the right degree of “challenging.”

“Do either of you even know how to contact those runners without me?”

Sometimes Deacon thinks of some of the old holovids he saw as a kid, weird little cartoons that someone scavved out of a vault somewhere and projected up on a makeshift screen put up in the main square. In them, there was always this one guy who’d get super-frickin’-pissed about…. Deacon doesn’t entirely remember, stupid stuff probably, and when he did, he’d puff up real big and his face would turn red and steam would come out of his ears like a teakettle. It was great. Pre-war comedy at its finest.

He thinks about that a lot when he’s around Carrington. In Carrington’s defense, Deacon _is_ infuriating. But if the man didn’t want to get poked at so much, he should wear such big, obvious red buttons with his weak spots on them. There’s a reason no one ever lets him out of HQ anymore.

“You know we don’t,” Carrington snaps, “and if you’d like to revisit your habit of holding onto critical information with some ham-fisted excuse of ‘operational security’ I’d be happy to discuss it further-”

Desdemona silences him with a hand on his arm. “Deacon does have a point, as loathe as I am to admit it,” she says. The look she gives him is more openly bitter than she usually allows herself, but he just gives her an open, easy grin, no cares in the world. Dez isn’t the first alpha to take a swipe at him for his work- Pinky wouldn’t even let him back to HQ, near the end there- but they all stop complaining when the results come rolling in. They can dislike him all they want, as long as they don’t get too much in his way. “We can rotate some of our people currently in Diamond City out to the southern route to fill the gaps.”

“Which does absolutely nothing to address the problems we’re having _in_ Diamond City, or are you under the impression that _less_ intelligence is somehow superior?”

“Perhaps you’re under the impression that presenting criticisms without any alternate suggestions is somehow _helpful_ , but-”

“We can pull some of the lookouts from the settlements,” Deacon interrupts. Both of them swivel to give him a look at that, and he shrugs, just casual enough to seem arrogant in the face of their annoyance. “Nobody questions if someone comes into city from the farms to set up shop for a few weeks, right? Get them in, let some of the heat die down, and then we can work out our coverage from there. I’ve got some ideas to ferret out our weak links-”

“Of course you do,” Carrington grumbles.

“-but it’ll take time and some freedom to move, neither of which we have right now,” Deacon finishes, and rolls his eyes expansively, slumping back in his chair with his arms crossed. Carrington had a teenage son, once upon a time. He’d be Deacon’s (apparent) age if he’d lived. Deacon’s not above playing on the stereotype to get Carrington to underestimate him,which the old bastard always seems more than happy to do. “This isn’t rocket science, people. Route runners to the settlements, lookouts to the city, city runners to the south. One-two-three.”

Dez sighs and pinches her nose. “And who, exactly, is supposed to get the new city runners settled into Diamond City? You, I suppose?”

“Well, now that you mention it,” he drawls. It’s so _nice_ when people bring things up without him having to spell it out for them. “It’ll give me a chance to start working on figuring out where the Institute has set up shop along the coast, too. Two birds, one stone, whaddaya say?”

Dez sighs. He’s intimately familiar with that sigh, and its many cousins. “Go,” she says. “And take Whisper with you, if you please. I know you’ve been reluctant to keep us in the loop for your handover protocols-” Here Carrington glowers and settles back into his chair with an audible huff. “-but even you must admit that operational security isn’t best served by consolidating down into the hands of one person. You’ve been reluctant to pick a second operative, so I’m picking for you. Take Whisper.”

Deacon sits straight up, his eyes going narrow behind his shades. “Whoa, hey now. Don’t you think it’s a little soon to be talking about-”

“I think this is exactly the time,” she interrupts, in that “velvet over steel” voice he’s pretty sure she practices in the mirror. “While I don’t approve of your secrecy in this matter any more than Carrington, I have always deferred to your judgement. However, in this case I must insist. We can’t have anyone be irreplaceable, Deacon. Not anymore.”

“Operational security-”

“Also requires operational redundancy,” she says firmly. “You’ve been treating Agent Whisper as your successor in these matters for some time now. I’m simply ensuring that you make sure the job is done properly.” She levels him with her best serious look. “Deacon. This is not a request.”

Deacon lets a muscle in his jaw flex, uselessly, before finally nodding in compliance. “You got it, boss,” he says, and then slides out of his chair and stalks off.

Behind him, he hears Carrington turn to Dez and say, “Are you quite sure you want to entrust this to-” before the closing door cuts him off. So he’ll be in there for a while, then. Which means that his workstation is free and clear for anyone with a busy pair of hands that might need some supplies on the way out the door.

Deacon whistles to himself as he shoves the stimpaks in his pocket and starts poking around through the food stores. That went even better than he’d thought it would. When he first went in there, Dez was talking about keeping him back at HQ for a couple weeks to help coordinate the reorg, and sending Whisper out after another one of PAM’s DIA caches. By the time he suggested his alternative, they were annoyed enough to remember why they hated having him around HQ, and more than happy to take on the tactical work that Carrington believes is his by right and Dez thinks she ought to fight for, leaving him with the low dirty work they secretly think is beneath them. Deacon, on the other hand, just got out of a lot of boring planning work and wrangled himself and his partner a free week in Diamond City, with the latitude to fuck off in the marketplaces in the name of intelligence gathering, and he didn’t even have to ‘fess up about her fever. _Winning,_ that’s what he calls it.

Whisper’s gone when he makes his way back to the mattress, the blanket already rolled up and secured to her pack, but a quick glance through her stuff shows a few essential supplies missing and he hunts her down in the bathing quarters, stripped down to her underthings and wincingly scrubbing off some of the road dirt with a sliver of homemade soap and a sinkful of lukewarm water. She’s not quite fast enough to catch the ration bar that he throws at the back of her head, but she does manage to catch it on the rebound, tears it open with her teeth and turns to give him an inquisitive look.

“Sustenance,” he says, dumping the purloined stimpaks down on the counter next to her and being unsubtle about eyeing her bruises. Damn, does he look that bad? He hopes not. “Aaaaand refreshment.”

“You’re a prince,” she says, around an inadvisably large bite of ration bar, and spikes herself in her bare thigh with the first stimpak, no hesitation. Deacon winces a little at her heavy hand- it’s got to fuckin’ hurt- but she just pulls it out, gives the second stimpak a flick of her nail to settle the contents, and does it again. _Watch out, we got a badass over here._ Only she’s too unselfconscious to be playing to her audience of one. “So where to?”

He leans up against the counter next to her, careful to keep away from the splashes of water that would soak the seat of his jeans, and folds his arms over his chest. “How do you know I got us an assignment, hey? Maybe we’re stuck here for the next week, on account of you being all sick and boring now.” She gives him a speaking look, and he laughs. “Diamond City,” he admits. “We’re rotating around some of our people after the thing-”

“Fuck the Institute,” she says, obligingly, when he pauses.

“-and we’re going to make ourselves useful overseeing the shuffle. A lot of the runners won’t set up shop without the right codes.”

“I bet the Institute got you by setting off a false reorg before.”

He laughs again. Every once in awhile, she does something to remind him why she’s his favorite person. “Heard about that, huh?”

She shoves the last of the ration bar in her mouth. “No, but it’s what I would do,” she says, around the crumbs.

_Favorite person. Hands down._ “Which reminds me, I need to show you the handoff protocol.”

“Oh yeah?” Her casual tone belies the sudden wave of tension he can see creeping down her spine. She’s a damn good liar in the general run of things (not quite in his league, but who is?) but her control over her face isn’t reflected in control over the rest of her. Normally she’d have layers of gear to hide most of it, but right now she’s stripped down of more than just her clothes.

_It’s probably a bad sign,_ he tells himself wryly, _when you’ve got a beautiful woman almost naked in front of you and you’re most interested in her *tells.*_ “Yeah, we use different sets for the runners, since they move more, need to keep it changed up. We keep ‘em out of the records, so there’ll be at least one group still active in case HQ goes down for real.”

“I’m guessing that happened before too.”

“Got us down to one heavy, three lookouts, and a single runner, once,” Deacon says. “A long time ago. Apparently it took a while to rebuilt after that, so we always made sure to keep the cells isolated, not just the safehouses. Better for everyone that way.”

“Smart,” she says approvingly. He preens, obviously enough that she laughs and shoves at his shoulder. Knocks him into a wet patch, damn it. Worth it for the grin on her face.

“Been meaning to show you anyway, but it hasn’t come up yet. And Dez just authorized it all official-like, so we won’t even get any grief over it.” Deacon’s always at his happiest when people tell him to do things he was going to do anyway. “Just don’t lord it over Glory, you know how she hates when you know things she doesn’t.”

“Not that you’d know anything about that,” she says. She dips the washcloth back into the water, and lets her shoulder nudge over to lean against his as she goes back to washing up. In thanks, he knows. For more than just the stimpaks.

“You know me,” he says. “I never know nothin’ about nothin’.”

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

He lets Drums know their marching orders while she gets their stuff together, and they set off less than an hour later, a little before noon. The trip down to Diamond City is about as uneventful as an afternoon jaunt through the mean streets of Boston ever is, which is to say that they only have to kill six raiders and sneak around three mutie dens. Whisper’s flagging pretty bad by the time they get there, the stimpaks long since worn off and the fever back with a few friends to boot, judging by the wet, ugly way she started coughing a few miles back. The doctor in DC will have something for that, at least. Deacon keeps his worry off his face and just puts a hand on her elbow to steer her straight, distracting her with a running patter of stories about some of the other Railroad members that have her in stitches, laughing until she coughs again and glaring at him even as she’s trying not to grin.

About a quarter mile from the gate, they call halt to have a quick planning session over how they want to play it. Deacon’s got more aliases active in Diamond City than he can shake a stick at, but only a couple to go with this face. None of them are really designed for him to show up with someone else in tow. It didn't used to be an issue.

Whisper only really has the one: Olivia Bailey, ruins rover and mysterious traveler, introduced on her first visit to the city’s gates and kept going ever since. It has the advantage of being well-established and fairly well-connected, but it also means she’ll be visible, and that means memorable. Which can have its advantages, definitely. But maybe not for supervising a changeover. It’s a problem.

“We can hit a stash house near here, come up with something and go in tomorrow morning,” she offers, once they’ve gone over the pros and cons. Her voice is a little rough from both from the discussion and the period bouts of coughing, and he can hear the serrated edge of her breathing. “I think I’ve got something that’ll make us a fairly convincing pair of traders.”

Deacon looks at her pale, pinched face and thinks, _I don’t want to wait till tomorrow morning._ Even if she’s right about it not being an infection- and he’s still not a hundred percent convinced- he’s seen illness turn too fast, too many times to be as casual about it as she apparently is. If he’d known it was going to go downhill this quick, he never would have let her out of HQ, and to hell with her weird issues. He wants to get her into a doctor _tonight._ “I think we can make it work. You used a different cover when you did your Minutemen gig, right? Not that I’m judging. Well, judging much. You know my feelings on diversification.”

“Boy do I,” she sighs. Her shoulder twitches slightly; uncomfortable with the topic of conversation. “But yeah. Two different covers. You know me, I don’t like to cross the streams. There’s only a couple people in the loop, but they won’t be a problem.”

“Friends?”

“In all the right places.” A grin now, lazy. Happier at the shift in topic. “And anyway, Piper’s out of town right now, doing some puff piece on the Minutemen and bonding with her sister. No need to worry about ducking _those_ questions, thankfully.”

Yeah, Deacon’s not eager to be making _that_ woman’s acquaintance anytime soon. “And Nick Valentine?”

She raises an eyebrow at that, and he just raises his own right back. What, was he _not_ supposed to know about her and Valentine? Come on. Her dramatic rescue of Diamond City’s resident synth was one of the things that had put her on his recruitment radar in the first place.

“And Nick,” she says, after a brief stare-down. “But Nick knows how to keep his mouth shut.”

Well that’s nothing but the truth. Deacon’s never met the man personally- why risk it?- but he’s paid out his weight in gold in terms of tips to the right people, over the years. Has a disconcerting habit of being able to spot Deacon’s runners, but nobody’s perfect. “An admirable trait in a friend,” Deacon says solemnly. “You know, you could take a few lessons from the detective. Not that I’m complaining, but you’re a bit of a motormouth when you get going-”

She’s not so sick that she can’t give him one hell of a shove, at least. He grins and picks up his pack. He considers grabbing hers, too- it looks heavy- but she snatches it up before he can get past the consideration stage. Ah, well.

“One advantage to this is, no need for costume for me. Gimme like five minutes to look slightly less like death and I’ll be good to go,” she says. “What about you?”

The easiest option would be to play a hireling, a merc of some kind, or maybe a bodyguard. He knows she’s done it before, even brought them with her as Olivia into Diamond City, from time to time. He’d fit right in- especially the way he looks right now, which is to say somewhat less at death’s door than she is but still pretty fuckin’ rough. It’s the smart way to do it.

Of course, her cover isn’t the sort who’d have an affair with a merc in her pay, either.

“It'll be a surprise!” he says, offensively cheerful, but she just shrugs and turns away to start rummaging through their supplies. Clearly, he's gotten her a bit too used to improv work.

Half an hour later they finally make it to the front gates, and they have to buzz a couple times for entry before a familiar voice crackles across the intercom, breathless with apology. "Sorry, folks, caught us at shift change. Who's out there?"

"Hey Danny," Whisper says. She can’t do anything about the rough edge to her breathing, but her voice smooths out, the hoarseness gone in favor of a cocky, honeyed charm that’s a trademark of her cover. "No worries. It's Olivia Bailey and-" She glances at him, purses her lips. He still hasn't told her what he's going to be doing, mostly because he hasn't decided yet. "Guest."

"Mz. Olivia!" That's genuine happiness in Danny's voice. Deacon remembers just how many people know and like this cover, and reconsiders some of his earlier hesitance. Normally it would take new people a while to talk their way past the gate. Definitely some advantages in doing it this way, as long as they’re smart about it. "It’s good to hear your voice. I was starting to worry something had happened to you out there."

Whisper laughs. "Good to see you too, Danny," she says, as the gates start grinding open. "All sorts of stuff happened, but most of it isn’t very interesting. Got any good gossip for me?"

"Now, you know I don't do stuff like that, Mz. Olivia," Danny says, pained, through the speakers. A pause. "Now, if I were to _speculate,_ I might be able to tell you that-"

The gates open enough that they can duck under, and the rest of Danny's sentence comes from the security desk off to the right. "-Mayor MacDonaugh tried to sell off your house, seeing as it's been a few months since you've been in it."

"Oh did he now," Whisper says, her voice velvety in that particular way that means someone's head is going to roll.

"But Mz. Piper talked him out of it. Told him that nobody’d be willing to buy if it got out that he was double-dealing off their stuff. Threatened to make a big article out of it and everything.”

“That’s my girl,” Whisper says in satisfaction. “Guess I’ll have to leave her a thank-you note, for when she gets back into town. Nick’s still around, right?”

“Oh yeah,” Danny says. “He’ll be right pleased to see you. Apparently he’s been getting more work than he can handle recently.”

“Well, I’ll have to see what I can do to help.” She grins mischievously, all cocky charm. “Or at least distract him a little. Whichever’s more fun.”

This cover is a good look on her, Deacon has to admit. She’s all slicked-back dark hair and movie-star sunglasses, all the better to set off the dimple at the corner of her mouth and the flash of her straight white teeth against her dark skin. It also helps to hide the lines that exhaustion and illness have drawn around her eyes and mouth, the leanness in her cheeks where they haven’t had more than snatched meals and ration bars for weeks. She looks healthy and charming and most importantly, _familiar_ , the way that a woman on the cover a magazine looks familiar, just on the curve of the smile. Deacon knows that Danny’s got to be looking at her right now and thinking of when he first saw her, coming through this very gate, dusty from the road with a dog at her heels and a million-dollar grin, saying she was just passing through and making it sound like she was on her way to bigger and better things. Whisper’s learned a lot from him since she joined up, but how to lie with a smile was one thing he never had to teach her.

“Well, you make sure to tell me all about it,” Danny says firmly, a grin twitching at the corner of his mouth. He jerks his chin at Deacon, standing at her shoulder. Deacon spent over a week working with the guy. They had lunch together down at Power Noodles three separate times. Danny showed him pictures of his dog. There's no recognition on his face when he says, "Who's this? The next MacCready?"

_MacCready._ Deacon files it away. He'd noted her with a merc before, in Diamond City a few times and Goodneighbor a lot more often, and he'd suspected it to be the same merc who'd been spotted in the Third Rail trying to sell out to the highest bidder, but he'd never gotten close enough to confirm. He awards himself a mental point for guessing correctly.

"Oh yeah, almost forgot," Whisper says, like she wasn't bantering with Danny in hopes to distract him enough that he wouldn't ask for a cover Deacon hasn't actually given her yet. "This is-"

As entertaining as it would be to watch her try to come up with his cover for him on the spot- and as entertaining as it would be to try and play along with whatever she comes up with- he's got a better idea. Well, "better." It's actually a terrible idea. On the other hand, it’s been awhile since he’s tossed her a proper challenge on an op. He doesn’t want her to get overconfident, right? That would just be irresponsible, as her trainer. Really, he’s doing this for her benefit.

"I'm John," he says, and puts his arm around her, the better to feel the sudden, silent intake of breath when he finishes, "John Bailey," and holds out his hand across the desk. "Nice to meet you."

"Uh," Danny says, and then recovers enough to grab his hand and shake just a shade too vigorously. "Good to meet you, man. I didn't know Olivia was married."

"Suprise!" Whisper says, putting her arm around Deacon's waist and smiling affectionately up at him. Luckily, he's got enough practice holding an expression that it doesn't waver even when she takes advantage of her new position to deliver a truly vicious pinch to the sensitive skin at his waist, where his combat vest has a gap in the lacings. "It's not something I go out of my way to talk about, y'know? But we had some time, figured we might take a week off and rest up. You know how it is."

He can hear her let go of the control that's keeping her illness out of her voice, the hoarseness that she lets creep back in and the slightly choppy sound of her breathing. Before she was trying to call back the confident, untouchable woman that Danny first met, setting the stage. Now she's trying to cue him for the next bit. The least Deacon can do is play his part.

He strokes one thumb along her shoulder. "Doc Sun's still open, right? She took a bad rad hit on the road and hasn't quite come back all the way. I want to get her looked at."

All true, as far as it goes, the way the best lies tend to be. Deacon pairs it with a gruff, low voice, just slightly anxious with worry: a perfect match for his rough, road-dirty, desperately-in-need-of-a-shave look. Establishing himself as someone who’s worked with Olivia, has seen combat with her, both recently and frequently enough to be comfortable with it. A merc, Danny’s going to be thinking, or a caravan guard. Someone whose work keeps him and their good buddy Olivia separate for long periods of time. _Romantic,_ he’s thinking, because that’s the kind of guy Danny is.

And sure enough, Danny’s surprise softens into understanding. “He’ll be closing up soon, but I’ll radio ahead, let him know he’s got a customer incoming. You might get some grumbles, but he’ll see you. He’s not the sort to turn away a patient.”

_Or his caps,_ Deacon finishes mentally. “Thanks. ‘preciate it.”

“We’d better get going,” Whisper says, and smiles at Danny. “It’s good to see you again.”

“Always good to see you, Mz.- er, Missus Olivia,” Danny says, reaching for the gate control. “Hope you feel better.”

“Thanks, Danny.” The inner gate grinds open in turn, and Whisper lets her head fall to his shoulder as Deacon leads her onward, as much because she is genuinely exhausted as to get her mouth near his ear. “Aw, look at us,” she murmurs, quiet enough that Danny can’t hear her. “A pair of newlyweds revisiting the place where we met.”

“First of all, it’s sweet that you think that the front gate was the first time,” he says back, low-voiced. He’d wondered if she remembered him being here, the first time she came through the gate. She’d been distracted. Apparently not _that_ distracted. “And second of all, newlyweds? Really? I was thinking more of a, ‘long partnership tragically interrupted by the whims of fate and employment,’ sort of thing.”

“The front gate was the first time you made contact, so it’s the first time that counts,” she shoots back, which, okay, fair. “And you might want to stick with the newlyweds story, Romeo. I’ve been known to be something of a terrible flirt.”

He rolls his eyes. The sky is blue, water is wet, et cetera. “Tell me something I _don’t_ know. Any actual affairs?”

“Not in Diamond City,” she says. Her face is ducked down too far for him to see her expression, but he can recognize the wicked grin she’s wearing by tone alone. A woman who likes her pleasures, is Whisper. He should know.

“Then I’m not the jealous type,” he decides. Though he is the _curious_ type. A lot of friends and comrades, but none of his people have ever been able to confirm a lover for her. Interesting to know if she’s just playing it up for effect or if one of her left-behind friends was something a bit more. “It’ll work. And hey. How do you know that was the first time I made contact, huh?”

“It was,” she says confidently. “I’d remember.”

“You so sure of that?”

“Yeah. I’d know you anywhere.”

_Aw, partner, the things you say._ “Maybe with this mug,” he says, his voice light and steady. “We’ll see how well you do when I do one of my face swaps.”

This time, when she smiles, he can feel it on his collarbone. “You know how much I like a challenge.”

Nobody likes a challenge that much, in his experience. Maybe after the first time, when it’s still a novelty, but definitely not after the third, or the fourth, or the fifth. He’s been slowing down in recent years, not able to heal up quick enough for the fast changes he used to be able to do, but still. He’s overdue. If she’s going to be sticking around, she’ll have to deal with it at some point.

No one he’s ever slept with has ever seen him through a changeover. That should be… interesting.

“We’ll see,” he says, and steers her down the steps.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Doctor Sun is predictably annoyed at being interrupted while attempting to leave for supper, but a few extra caps cheer his outlook considerably. Plus, he’s worked on Whisper before and seems fond of her, in his irascible way. She seems fond of him, too, if the way she pokes at him seemingly just for the pleasure of hearing him get annoyed in return is any judge. Deacon’s not entirely surprised. While she rarely seeks medical treatment if she can handle it on her own (and a few times when she manifestly can’t), she’s mostly favored him over occasionally more convenient doctors.

(Somewhere in the back of his head, Deacon has a mental copy of Sun's medical file for her, circa three weeks before she joined the Railroad. No known diseases, minimal long-term radiation exposure, evidence of malnourishment sometime in childhood or adolescence. Purchases stimpaks on a regular basis, frequently trades raw ingredients rather than caps. Treatments mostly involve radiation removal or post-first aid wound treatment. One surgical procedure, to implant long-term birth control.

Mostly, he tries to forget he read it. It was on the invasive side even for him before she was recruited, and since they’ve been working together it’s at best extremely dubious. Thankfully, no hard copies exist for her or anyone else to stumble over, and he’s not planning on telling her anytime soon.)

He makes sure to hover anxiously, the very picture of the nervous husband, while Sun gives her a thorough once-over. Eventually the doc diagnoses her with a simple summer cold- admittedly, he adds when Deacon gives him a look of pure husbandly overprotective outrage, complicated by recent radiation exposure.

“I will not ask how you managed this,” he says waspishly, poking through his pill cabinets for a restorative. “Only because I know I will not like the answer.”

“There might have been a swamp involved,” Whisper says, apparently just to provoke the annoyed growl that rumbles out of his throat. Deacon, standing next to her, gives her elbow a warning squeeze. _Don’t push your luck with the nice doctor._ She scowls back up at him: _I know what I’m doing._

“What did I just say?” And then, “Here,” as he shoves the bottle of pills in her direction. “Take one with each meal, until the bottle is gone. No cheating! And _rest._ None of this running around in swamps unless you want to see me again.” He looks at her over the rim of his glasses. “If you must see me again soon, I will ensure you do not like it.”

“Cross my heart, Doc,” Whisper says, suiting action to word with an impish grin as she takes the bottle. Sun rolls his eyes, apparently immune to her charm. _That makes one of them._

“This, I have heard before. I would suggest bed rest, but I know that you will not comply, so I will say simply _rest,_ as much as possible.” He fixes Deacon with a beetle-browed stare. “I’m made to understand that you have been foolish enough to tie yourself to this madwoman, so I entrust this responsibility to you. Do not allow her to overexert herself. The pills will treat the symptoms, but the illness must run its course on its own, and it is in danger of lapsing into an infection of the lungs. This would be very bad. Must I say more?”

“I’ll take care of her, Doc,” Deacon promises, and tucks Whisper under his arm, brushes a kiss across her forehead when she looks up at him. _Don’t oversell it,_ her skeptical look tells him, hidden from Sun’s view by Deacon’s strategically angled shoulder. _Teach your gran to suck eggs,_ he shoots back with a quirk of his brow. “I don’t want anything to happen to her.”

“You’re rather late for that, I’m afraid, but I’m sure she appreciates the thought.” He looks back to Whisper, who does her best to look innocent. Sun snorts. “Please see me when it’s time to remove those stitches in your shoulder. Whoever patched you up did an excellent job, though I think rather less of him or her if they failed to notice your other ailments. Regardless, their hard work will have come to naught if you get impatient and hack them free with your boot knife-” He holds up a hand as Whisper opens her mouth. “-as I know you did before, so please don’t try to argue with me. Would you like the rest of you to end up as scarred as your arms? No, don’t answer that. Simply do as I tell you.”

Whisper gives him a limpid look. “Yes, Doctor Sun.”

“Excellent. Now get out of my office. I have better things to do than look after your foolishness.”

They get, though more because Whisper’s been eyeing the Power Noodles stand longingly for the last ten minutes then because they’re afraid of his temper. Deacon’s feeling pretty peckish himself. And, more importantly, he wants to get a meal down her throat so she can take her first dose.

Whisper holds up two fingers to the ‘bot and then walks them down the bar in what is apparently a gesture for “to go,” judging by the pair of covered bowls that Takahashi delivers them a minute later. Deacon slides the caps across the counter as Whisper shrugs her pack a little higher on her shoulders and grabs the bowls before he can stop her, stacking them precariously on top of each other and taking off down the half-rotted boards that demark the “street” with him a half-step behind.

“I could grab one of those, y’know,” he points out when he catches up. “Just being helpful. I’m a helpful person.”

“It’s just soup,” she says, rolling her eyes. “I think I can handle it.”

And there’s that again. _I can handle it._ He never thought her to be the sort to have a chip on her shoulder, but… 

Well. Problem for another time. “Yes, _my_ soup,” Deacon says. He makes a grab for it, but she ducks nimbly away. Even sick she’s too fast for him, damn it. “I have some investment in making sure it doesn’t end up all over the ground.”

“Are you doubting my sense of balance, partner?”

“I would never,” Deacon says immediately. If he tries to grab it again, it’s just going to increase the odds that it spills when she dodges. Or worse, piss her off for real. “How dare you accuse me of such slander. I would never be so faithless. I-” She turns and gives him an unimpressed look. “Please don’t drop my soup. I’m fuckin’ starving.”

“You and me both, kid,” she says, and leads them off down the marketplace, fetching up by an unmarked door down at the end of the block. “Here, you big baby. You want the soup so much, you get the soup.”

He only barely gets his hands out in time to catch the bowls when she passes them over, hissing a little when the too-hot bottoms of the bowls make contact with his bare palms. “Fuck. Ow.” She gives him a speaking look, and he shrugs, shifts his grip a little. “Just saying.”

“It’s times like these that I sympathize with women who murder their husbands,” she informs him, and slings her pack to the ground, rifling through the pockets. “Keys, keys, where did I put the keys…”

Deacon looks from her to the door. It doesn't suddenly start looking any more familiar. “Wait. _This_ is your place?”

“Yes?” she hazards. “Wait, didn’t you know that already? How did you not know that?”

He's touched by her faith in him, but- “Contrary to popular belief, I don’t know everything, partner. I just make it look that way.”

“Where did you think I stayed while I was in the city?”

“I knew you rented a room in the Dugout. Never realized you picked up a place on the side.” He looks around, considers how close they are to the market, and does a few quick mental calculations. “Bet this set you back a pretty penny.”

“I’ve got a couch in Goodneighbor that’s worth a lot more,” she says absently. His gaze snaps to the back of her head, but she doesn’t notice, too busy pulling her lockpicks out of her sleeve and flicking on the light on her Pip-boy to better see what she’s doing as she crouches in front of the lock. “Keep watch,” she orders. “This would be the most embarrassing visit to jail ever.”

“Maybe for you,” he says, and automatically moves to block her from passing view. _Goodneighbor, huh?_ There's a story there, and an interesting one, if he knows her at all. He's going to have to pry that out of her sometime. “There was that time I was playing a- I think the polite term is ‘lady of the night-’”

“Maybe if you’re ninety,” she says, not even looking up from the lock. The light from her Pip-boy makes her fingers seem to glow as they dance over her picks, until a moment later the lock clicks open, and she gives a little victory wriggle that does interesting and flattering things to her backside. (Which is, admittedly, hard to ignore at the best of times.) “Still got it,” she purrs, her voice low and husky, and flashes a triumphant grin over her shoulder at him. He feels a responding flush spill down the back of his neck.

_Well, that’s new._ He’s always appreciated her ability to finesse a lock, but he’s always figured it was for more _intellectual_ reasons, like the way he enjoys watching her crack a terminal, or pick a pocket, or work her way undetected into a raider stronghold: the pleasure of watching an undisputed master practice her craft. Now he’s thinking me might have to reevaluate that assessment a bit.

_Put a pin on that and come back to it later,_ he promises himself, as she stands and elbows open the door, her picks disappearing back into her sleeve as if they were never there. _It’s not like there’s any shortage of locked doors in our line of work._

Inside it's just a cramped little space, lit up in sickly green from the glow off her Pip-boy and some weird bright glow from off to the left that turns out to be a lit-up Christmas tree. _Because of course it is._ Whisper catches his gaze going to it and snorts, waving a hand as if to say, _Whaddaya gonna do,_ and fumbles at the wall switch for a moment before she swears and pulls a flip lighter out of her pocket, lights up one of the oil lamps sitting on the counter just inside the entryway.

"Wiring's a little tricky," she says, dropping her pack to the floor and waving him towards the counter in invitation. "I'll take a look at it to-" A coughing fit interrupts her, and he waits it out, wincing as a particularly strong burst seems to wrack her tiny frame. It's just as well that his hands are busy with their dinner; she wouldn't want the comfort of a hand on her back. Not right now. "-tomorrow," she finally finishes, her voice raspy, looking annoyed. "Fuckin' cold."

"No rush," he says. He gladly drops the soup bowls down next to the rusty sink, nudging a few stray boxes of Sugar Bombs out of the way to make room. One side of the counter is absolutely covered in pre-packaged food, and the other in haphazard stacks of ammo, like the nest of sometime kind of demented squirrel. The wall behind it is lined with crooked pre-war pinup posters, torn and creased. He's never seen _anything_ of hers that couldn't fit into a holster or a pack. "Who doesn't enjoy the fine glow of firelight in the evening?"

"People who don't like having to light a candle just to take a piss?"

"There's no romance in your soul," Deacon chides her, but he drops his pack beside hers and starts poking around while she lights the rest of the lanterns and hunts for silverware in the drawers. It's not a large apartment, even for Diamond City standards, barely enough room for the somewhat listing couch in one corner, and her little cookstove and desk in the other, with her seven-months-too-late (or five-months-too-early, depending) Christmas tree next to it. There's a poster of Mr. Pebbles stuck on the wall next to the Christmas tree and dead potted plants everywhere. He's not entirely sure he wants to know.

(That's a lie. He wants to know _everything._ )

The set of stairs near the doorway that looks like it leads up to a two-story loft, probably with the rest of the living quarters. (He doesn't entirely put it past her to just sleep on the couch, but he figures she at least _has_ a bed up there somewhere.) Although there, in the corner with the Christmas tree, there's a stack of boxes forming a barricade, with just enough space for a person to squeeze through. He pokes his head through and finds stacks upon stacks of supply crates, with just enough room for a long walkway with a trio of target dummies at the end. One of the target dummies is missing a head.

"This is not the bathroom," he says out loud, and nearly jumps a foot when he hears Whisper say in his ear, "No kiddin’."

He pulls back just far enough to glare at her, and finds her standing right behind him, looking amused. "Preparing for the nuclear apocalypse, partner? 'Cause I've got a spoiler for you- that one already went down."

"Oh, that shit's not mine," she says easily. "The place came with the warehouse space when I bought it, so I let some of Hancock's people use it as a stash house. They're supposed to water the plants when they come through, but you can see how well _that_ works."

"Huh." He'd known that she was friends with Hancock, certainly, but "commits crimes with and for a person" level of friendship is a little different than "lets them stash illicit supplies in my house" level of friendship. And her comment about a couch for her in Goodneighbor- Hmm. Something to store away for later. He's never gotten the opportunity to observe them together, but now he wants to. He’ll put it on the list. "I'm guessing you don't have a dining room table in here, huh?"

"If only I'd known how high-maintenance you are when I married you," she says mournfully, and nudges him towards the couch. "C'mon, we can use the coffee table. Close enough, right?"

They eat in comfortable silence, Whisper downing her pill with a swig from their shared canteen and chasing it with a spare stimpak they bought off Sun. By the end of the meal her breath is coming a lot clearer and some of the color has come back to her face, and Whisper moves their empty bowls to a rickety-looking end table and swings one lean thigh over his lap, presses him back against the cushions and ducks her head to kiss a line up the side of his neck. Deacon lets his head loll back, his hands coming up to cradle her hips. She’s still overwarm, a tiny furnace under his hands. It should be a reminder that he should stop her. Instead, he can feel his pulse tick a couple notches higher in response.

“You’re sick,” he says, but his protest lacks a bit of punch considering that his thumbs are rubbing against the familiar jut of her hipbones, the pads of his fingers over the dimples just above her ass. “I distinctly remember saying something about you oh-so-generously including me in your sphere of contagion.”

Whisper laughs softly into the hinge of his jaw, her hot breath washing softly along his throat. “Not that sick,” she says. “And I believe I told you before- with as much time as we spend together, there’s no way you’re not getting sick. This isn’t even the worst way you could catch it.”

“You make a compelling point.” He slides his hands up her back, under her shirt. One long expanse of hot, smooth skin, interrupted only by the straps of her bra. A good partner lends a hand, so he sets to work undoing the catches. He’s a giver. “Although the good doctor did tell you to get some rest.”

“This is restful,” she says into his mouth. “Aren’t you feeling sleepy?”

She kisses away any kind of answer he would give, and fair enough- he doesn’t feel much like banter now, either. They shuck their clothes in between slow, drugging kisses, wriggling free of boots and pants and shirts without actually moving her out of his lap due to her flexibility and a lot of practice. Eventually, however, they have to separate long enough to get out of their underwear, and she gets up to wriggle them free, stands there with an idle hand between her legs and watches him stroke his cock. She licks her lips and he’s reaching up to grab for her, pull her down into his lap where she belongs, but she dances back just out of reach, waits until he’s sitting quietly with his hands at his sides. A wicked smile curves her mouth.

“I’ve got a better idea,” she says, and turns, steps back and down, between his splayed thighs. He grabs her hips to steady her and together they guide her down onto his cock, both of them moaning aloud at the slow tight slide of penetration. Once fully seated, Whisper tosses her hair out of her eyes with a careless flick and sits steady, rocking just enough to keep up some friction while his hands clench fruitlessly on her hips with the desire to make her move.

“I mean, you never carried me over the threshold, Johnny,” she says, her voice low and rough from coughing, sharp with Olivia’s cocky drawl. “I figure the least you could do is help me christen the new place.”

Lightning jags down his spine when he realizes what she’s doing, and his hands clench convulsively on her hips. “If that’s the case, baby, I’m guessing there’s a bed right up the way,” he husks back. She shifts to brace her hands on his knees, and he cups his palms over her wrists, shackles her into place and slouches down a little so that he can thrust up at just the right angle. Her head falls back and a moan rattles its way out of her throat.

“No, sweetheart, gotcha right where I want you,” she says, breathless, and he can’t argue with that, not with the way she’s picking up the pace, rocking faster now. She’s so wet that there’s almost not enough friction, but the angle and the tight squeeze of her cunt more than make up for it. “You just lay back and keep that dick nice and stiff for me, baby, and I’ll do all the work.”

Oh fuck, oh _fuck._ “You know I like to make you happy, darlin’,” he pants. Her _face,_ why can’t he see her face _._ “But you keep moving like that, I’m gonna have a real hard time of it.”

“I know,” she says. She presses down harder on his knees, starts fucking him in earnest. “But you gotta. You know you can.”

_I can’t,_ he thinks, but he’s already falling down into it. Turned away like this, she could be anybody; she doesn’t even sound like herself. But he knows it’s her. The familiar slickness of her knotted scars under his palms, the fluid line of her spine, the mole on her right shoulder: all things he knows like the back of his hand. Things he could map by touch in the dark. He knows her body better than he’s gotten around to learning his own. Why bother, when she already knows how to get it to dance to her tune?

She mutters something that he can’t quite catch, and he runs one hand up her spine, wraps it around the back of her neck. She lolls her head back into his grip, and he can just catch the barest sideways corner of her smile, just barely hear the words spilling out of her mouth.

“You’re so good, baby,” she’s saying, “you make me feel so good-”

_Aw, fuck_ , he thinks, because he can feel it building in his spine now, tightening his balls and filling his cock. He’s getting close. Too fucking close. He’s supposed to let her get there first-

“ _John,_ ” she moans, and that’s it. Show’s over, pure white-out, his brain damn near shutting down from how hard he comes. He’s probably squeezed hard enough to leave a bruise, but she doesn’t seem to mind, from the way she keeps rocking on him as he comes, slow and easy, gentling him down through it.

“Sorry,” he grits out, when he can talk, but she just stands up and turns, hasty, almost fumbling in her eagerness, falls back down into his lap with a barely-controlled slide. He manages to grab her to hold her steady, his hands half-numb and uncoordinated- but not so out of it that he doesn’t knock her hand away when it comes up between her thighs, rubs his fingers over her clit and watches from half-lidded eyes as she bites her lip.

“Oh please, oh please, I was so close-” she gets out, and he shoves two fingers into her, unceremonious and probably too rough, but she clamps down on him, her eyes going glassy. “Please, John-”

She’s so fucking wet from his come, he can feel it dripping out of her, and it makes him swallow hard, makes his dick twitch from where it lies spent and softening on his belly from how much she loves it. He doesn’t try anything fancy, just gets his fingers where she needs them and goes to work, hard and fast, just the way she likes it. “C’mon, baby,” he murmurs into her throat, feels the shudders running through her body and knows she’s close. “That’s it, Liv. Come for me,” and she moans and grabs his shoulders and does, her lean thighs clamped tight and trembling around his hips and her breath caught frozen in her throat.

_Promise of Destruction, Part III,_ he thinks, and works her through it. Fuck it. There’s worse ways to go.

Afterward, she’s the first one to move, yawning into the crook of his neck and rubbing her cheek affectionately against the scruff on his jaw before she clambers awkwardly back out of his lap and up to her feet. He follows her, taking a minute to steady himself against the inevitable headrush (fuck, they’re still so short on sleep, it’s not even funny) and then they grab the lantern and troop up to the loft, his bleary gaze fixed on the come smeared on the inside of her thighs. It’s an inspiring sight. He’d follow it a lot further than just up the stairs.

There’s a tiny little bathroom a half-stair up from the platform that holds the bed, and they both wearily scrub up with lukewarm water drawn protestingly from creaky pipes, wiping away sweat and come and road dirt as best they can with the limited facilities. He changes the dressing on her shoulder- coming along nicely, she might even be able to get the stitches out before they have to leave the city- and then they crawl under the covers, her with her back pressed tight against the wall and her limbs wrapped octopus-like around him from behind. She nuzzles a kiss against the top of his spine and sighs as she goes boneless.

“Night, sweetheart,” she mumbles low, and Deacon swallows hard. Half-wishing he could see her face. More than half-glad that he can’t.

“Night, darlin’,” he husks back, and blows out the light.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

They spend the next couple days mostly resting, getting some badly-needed food and sleep into their systems, and most importantly, spending entirely more caps than is advisable at the local bathhouse, since fuck knows when they'll next get the chance for a proper soak. The catacombs that house HQ are nicely central to a lot of their ops, but can't exactly boast state of the art plumbing. Then again, it was never meant to be used long-term. They hadn't exactly had a lot of options after the Switchboard went down. It was pretty much the best out of a bad lot, and even a year later he still hasn't been able to find an alternate site good enough to be worth the security risk of moving. Not after last time.

_Depressing, buddy,_ he tells himself. _Worry about today first. Make grand plans later._

Whisper also takes the opportunity to take care of some of her own business, and good for her. She goes to meet with Valentine their first morning there, and apparently promises to help him out with a case, although as far as Deacon can tell, "helping with a case" mostly seems to consist of wandering through the stalls and picking up on all the gossip, something that they're doing anyway. He suspects that she's mostly doing it to maintain her cover as a ruins-rover, selling off bits of scav and pre war antiques to various traders. (Her habit of collecting junk from every place they make camp suddenly makes a lot more sense.) All of the shopkeepers seem to know her, which is interesting, and to have seen her relatively recently, which is much more interesting. He’d known she did a lot of business in the city, before taking up as an agent, but he hadn’t realized that she’d found time to maintain the cover in between ops with him. His respect for her professional capabilities, always pretty high to begin with, goes up another few notches.

The word went out with the runners before they even left HQ, but it'll still take a couple days for their new tourists to make it in from the settlements, and in the meantime they need to get places for them set up. The Dugout is hiring again, thank fuck. Crazy Myrna is looking for a daytime hawker to take over while ol' Percy's charging up on the solar panels, and the delicious irony of _that_ makes it an opportunity too good to pass up. At some point in the last few months someone finally rousted old Sheffield, which means that there's a prime beggar's spot open right on the corner and oh hey, whaddaya know, there's a spot that opened unexpectedly on the city guard when someone just up and left a few days ago. How convenient.

"It's like a shell game," Whisper says that first evening, when they're brainstorming possibilities. "Keep people moving around so it's hard to pick one target out of a crowd."

He beams and leans back in his chair, kicks his booted feet up onto the desk. She's lying on her stomach on the floor next to him ("Good for the back," she said, when he gave her a look, and he forbore to point out that probably wasn’t what the doc meant by rest), taking notes in her fast, neat shorthand. They'll burn it before they go to bed, but she needs to get it down on paper to visualize the movements, at least now when she's just starting out. Give her, oh, maybe six months or so, judging by how fast she’s picked everything else up, and she won't need the crutch anymore. He doesn’t. It's been over a decade since he wrote anything down that wasn't a report he left at a dead drop.

“Now you’re gettin’ it, tiger,” he says. “Plus, Diamond City makes a nice training ground for new tourists. I like to take runners that seem to have a knack for this sort of thing and see how they handle the big city.”

“Huh,” Whisper says. She stops writing to consider, looks up at him with her lips pursed in thought. “But you _know_ there’s Institute informants here. Wouldn’t that make it more dangerous for new people?”

“Right,” he agrees. “We _know_ they’re here. Out in the big bad Commonwealth, you can only _assume_ that you’re being watched. Plus, pretty much anywhere else the size is gonna work against you. There’s a lot less people, and they all know each other, which makes anyone suspicious stand out like a sore thumb- and anyone new is automatically suspicious. In the city, you’ve got a lot higher population density, and a lot of transients. Makes it a lot safer for a baby spy trying out the game for the first time.”

“Yeah, but it also makes it easier for the Institute to replace people,” she points out, and looks up at him with an expression of pure mischief. “Or are you telling me that Piper’s articles are _false_?”

Deacon throws a pencil at her head, but she just catches it and puts it between her teeth with a grin, goes back to scritching away busily in her notebook. “Your intrepid reporter friend isn’t _entirely_ wrong, though we in the Railroad would greatly appreciate it if she’d stop stirring up a frenzy that’s going to lead to a lynch mob.” _Don’t think about that, don’t think about it-_ “And anyway, _yes,_ there’s a lot more Institute people here. But it still makes picking our people out of the crowd a lot harder on them. And sometimes, a fresh pair of eyes is what you need in order to spot the bad guys. Keep people in one place too long, they can get comfortable. There’s nothing more dangerous than that.”

“Is that why you keep telling me to make camp in raider dens instead of going back to base like sensible people?” she inquires.

“Nah, it’s about the ambience. You know me- I'm a romantic at heart."

On day three, the runners start rolling in. Deacon doesn’t recognize most of them- they’re all new enough that he hasn’t recruited any of them personally, just through his usual intermediaries. Contrary to what Dez seems to think, he doesn’t have the time to personally scope out and contact every single person they use in the field. That's what recruiters are for.

“So this is why you want someone in the Dugout,” Whisper says that afternoon, with them posted up at one of the tables outside, steadily working their way through (or at least appearing to work their way through) a bottle of Bobrov’s finest. “To keep an eye on newcomers. Do you have someone in there already?”

“Used to,” he admits. He’s slouched down low in his chair, his hat tipped down low over his eyes, his feet up on the chair opposite: the very picture of a lazy afternoon drunk. The shades hide the way he’s scanning the crowd as they move by. “One of the servers. We had to pull her a few months back when she reported a bit of undue attention from one of the customers. It was probably just a really persistent drunk, but-”

“Can’t be too careful.”

“Exactly. And Vadim hired someone else before we could shuffle one of our own in. Their new guy’s gone missing, though, so we’ve got a chance.”

Whisper rocks her chair back onto its back two legs, considers him over the rim of her sunglasses. It’s weird; he’s not used to not being able to see her eyes. “Just a chance?”

“Your faith in me is touching,” he says, “but I can’t just wave my hand and-”

“Uh, excuse me,” someone interrupts. Deacon tips his head back and looks up at the scavver standing over him- skinny, nervous, and young, with clothes a lot finer-made than the fine coating of dirt make them look. He also made it up to Deacon without being noticed, which is interesting. “Can you tell me the time?”

“Half past time to get a fucking watch,” Deacon says easily, and the kid narrows his eyes at him.

“Maybe mine’s in the shop.”

“They don’t make ‘em like they used to,” Deacon agrees, and the kid relaxes, rocks back onto his heels.

“Thank fuck. You the Vicar?”

“That’d be me,” Deacon says. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Whisper make a face at him, like, _Seriously?_ “Congratulations, you’re the first one in.”

“Aw, do I get a prize?” The runner scrubs a hand over the back of his neck. “Cut the chatter, I’ve been on the road for three days straight.”

Deacon eyes him. Yeah, he’s pretty sure he remembers this kid’s file. Chip on his shoulder a mile wide, but his recruiter said he could charm the sun right out of the sky when he put in the effort. Possibilities.

“Report only. Your contact will use the same handoff until we need to change protocol. _Don’t_ accept a protocol change from anyone but me or her.”

“Her?” the kid says, eying Whisper with some skepticism. “Who the hell is she?”

She offers a smile with a lot of teeth. “I’m the one who’ll pull your ass out of the fire if you fuck up, Junior,” she says amiably, because Whisper is forever his favorite.

Deacon clears his throat to bring the kid’s attention back to him. “If we have to go under for whatever reason, your contact will use the emergency code to set off the reset- you remember?”

“‘course.”

“Good. Don’t move for anything else.” Deacon pulls out a sack of caps and flicks it to him under the table. The kid catches it and makes it disappear up his sleeve. Good reflexes, at least. Good hands. “Get a bath, get a set of clothes that don’t look like you’re aiming to die in ‘em, and get a job. We’re looking for long-term report, at least six months. Try in the Dugout, they’re looking for a new part-time bartender. If you can hack it, we’ll make you the new point man. Got it?”

“‘s not fuckin’ complicated.”

Hard to tell if the mouth is for real or for show. Only time will tell, he supposes. “And do something about your boots. They look like you just took ‘em off a rack.”

The kid flushes. “Got it,” he says, and hitches his pack higher on his shoulders before he beats feet. Deacon looks over to see Whisper drumming her fingers on the table.

“‘Vicar,’ huh?”

He grins. “You like that? I’ve got one for each level of operational security. Runners and lookouts get taken and switched a lot easier than heavies and tourists. Nice to keep things separate.”

“Thus the four-part code,” she says, nodding. “Makes sense. Harder to pick up.”

“Changes a lot more often, too. And you need it when you start with something so generic. Contacts get cycled out, and sometimes you end up having to hit up a couple people before you find the right one. Leave it to a single call-and-answer, and you might have someone hit the right code by accident.”

“I like it,” she says. “Why not use it for the tourists?”

“Because by that point, everyone knows everyone already and we’re just checking for replacements,” he says. “But if a replacement gets someone that high up-”

“You’re fucked.”

“We’re fucked,” he agrees. “Pretty much. So, we keep it simple, and just change the codes every once in awhile. No need to make things more complicated just for the sake of it. I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but you and I are something of an outlier when it comes to this sort of thing. You’ve got to plan for the lowest common denominator.”

“Snob,” she says affectionately. “So hey, if you’ve got extra code names, what about me? Shouldn’t I have one before I start handling the runners?”

“Oh but you do, my fine feathered friend,” he says, enjoying enormously the way that she sits upright in her chair, the front legs coming back to the paved patio floor with a rusty _clunk._

“Since when?”

“Since ever,” Deacon says. “I’ve been seeding your name through the ranks of the runners for months. You were assigned to Bunker Hill until last month, by the way. In case anyone asks.”

“Any particular reason I left?” she says. He shrugs.

“Hadn’t decided yet. I’ll let you know when I do. Until then, feel free to get creative.”

“You know I always do,” she says. She eyes him over the tops of her shades. “So what’s my code?”

“Shadow.” She continues to stare at him. “You know, ‘From the shadows, she sees all…?’”

She lets out her breath in a huff. “First of all, fuck you, I’m not the Mistress of Mystery. I’m the Shroud. You like disguises so much, you get to be the goddamn Mistress.”

He takes a minute to picture her in the Mistress’s signature gown-and-cloak. Then himself. The outfit definitely had a lot of leg involved. He’s got some pretty well-turned calves. “That’s fair,” he decides.

“Damn right it is.” She crosses her arms over her chest, a grin twitching at the corner of her mouth. “And second of all, my god, how are you this much of a dork? You never get to make fun of my comic addiction _again._ ”

“Hey, I’m not the one who dressed up in the costume and went around killing people.”

She points at him with her glass. “Hey. I was fighting crime, buster. That neighborhood was ill, and I was its cure.”

He just bets she was. He regrets that he was out of the city when she was on her rampage; that’s a sight that would’ve kept him warm on many a cold night. Someday he’s going to get her to break out the costume and then he’ll have fantasy fodder for _months_.

“Did Mayor Hancock appreciate you insulting his home turf like that?”

She grins, a secretive little quirk at the corner of her mouth. “You’d be surprised.”

Deacon wonders, not for the first time, about her friendship with the good Mayor. She's worked with any number of comrades since she arrived in the Commonwealth, but Hancock is the only one she's seen for any significant amount of time since she stepped down from the Minutemen. That fact, combined with some of the things she's said over the last few days, paints a much more intimate picture than he would have otherwise suspected.

More intimate than friendship, perhaps? She'd made a joke about flirtations, the day they arrived in the city, and he'd wondered if she'd had something more with one of her comrades. Considering the field of possibilities, Hancock is objectively the most likely option for a former lover. Which makes it doubly interesting that she's kept such an apparently solid friendship with the man. Deacon's not exactly an expert on the subject, but he knows enough to know that friendship rarely survives the introduction of sex to the mixture.

Deacon decides abruptly to cut that line of thought off in its tracks before it can reach its logical conclusion, and turns a lazy grin back to his partner. _We're solid. Whatever else happens, I can trust that much._ "Hey." When she doesn’t respond, he drops one foot to the ground and nudges hers with the toe of his boot. She looks up, one brow quirked in question. “Speaking of your bosom buddies....”

“Not your best segue, pal.”

“I work with the material I’m given,” he protests. “I just want to make sure you’re not neglecting other people. I mean, I am amazing, I don’t blame you for wanting to get as much of me as possible, but I can survive without you for a bit if you want to take care of some stuff.”

She smiles lazily. “If you want to get rid of me, you’re going to have to try harder than that.”

“As if. I’m just surprised you aren’t taking the opportunity while we’re here.” He knows she hasn't gone to see Valentine since that first morning when she rolled out of bed with a quick kiss and told him she was going to 'see a man about a dog.' “I’m just sayin’, I’m not gonna dock points if you want to skip class and hang out with the cool kids for a bit. You’ve been pretty all work and no play the past couple months.”

“If you’re telling me I’m turning into a dull girl, I think I might be hurt.”

He splays a hand across his chest, all faux offense. Thinks about the night before, the way she rose up over him in the dark. The barest sheen of lamplight against her dark skin, the flex of the muscles in her thighs under his hands, her hoarse voice mumbling “John” against his throat-

“Never that, partner.”

“As long as _that’s_ clear,” she says. She spins her glass between her fingers with the same idle grace he's seen her use when she's playing with her boot knife. “It’s fine. He knows I’m here with you.”

She slouches down in her chair, conversation apparently forgotten. Deacon lets the silence spoil out between them for a minute to make sure she’s actually done before he nudges her again. “And?”

“And, what?”

_Argh._ “And, what does Diamond City’s most upstanding synthetic citizen think of your tremendously handsome and charming new husband?”

“You mean the one that I’ve supposedly been married to for years?” she says, and laughs when he flicks a bit of the bottle label at her face in retaliation. “He doesn’t think anything. It’s not his business.” Deacon tilts his head and fixes her with his best skeptical look. “What?”

“Really?” he says. Their file on Valentine is about as extensive as any they’ve got, and Deacon’s gonna call bullshit on that one. ‘Out of character’ would be an understatement. “Just like that? The man’s a detective. I’m given to understand that asking questions is a pretty central part of the gig.”

She rolls her eyes. “Nick and I aren’t like that.”

“Oh really now.”

She matches his arched eyebrow. “Yes, really. I said, ‘Hey, I’m in town,’ and Nick said, ‘So I heard you got yourself hitched,’ and I said, ‘It’s business,’ and he said, ‘You’ll have to tell me about that sometime,’ and handed me a file. And that was the end of it.”

Huh. “Good friend.”

“The best.” She folds her arms over her chest and leans back in her chair. “Besides, I’m doing him a favor. Helping him out on one of his cases.”

Deacon looks at her. Looks around, at the bar patio, empty except for them and a couple of dedicated drunks at the other end. Looks at the bottle of moonshine on the table. Looks back at Whisper.

“Working hard, or hardly working?”

“Missing person,” she says with a grin, and nods toward the door to the Dugout. “Your conveniently missing part-time bartender. This here is what we in the detective biz call a stakeout, my friend.”

“Wow,” Deacon says. “And here I thought you were here for the pleasure of my company.”

“Baby, I’m all about the pleasure of your company,” she says, in Olivia’s easy drawl. It startles a crack of laughter out of him, and she just grins, pleased to have gotten such a good reaction. “That’s why I married you, to keep you around.”

Deacon grins back at her, openly affectionate. Fuck it. He’s supposed to be her spouse, right? “Besotted” is right there in the guidebook. “Darlin’, you’re the best day’s work I ever did.”

She lifts her half-empty glass in a salute. Maybe it’s a trick of the dying light, but he’s pretty sure that there’s a blush staining her cheeks.

“I’ll drink to that.”

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

By day six, all but one of the runners is in and placed, and they’ve got the dead drop sites laid out and ready to go. Assuming no other fun crises come up in the meantime, the situation in Diamond City should be more or less stable, at least for a few months. Not bad for a week’s work. Especially when it was mostly just an excuse to goof off and recover.

Even Whisper’s death cold has pretty much faded away into the occasional residual cough, but Doctor Sun assures them that it, too, will be gone within another couple days. Just as well; Deacon can only picture her face if one of her super-sneaky entrances into a raider camp gets interrupted by a coughing fit. Hilarious, but she’d probably make him pay for laughing.

Whisper herself disappeared right after dinner the previous day and hasn't resurfaced since. He's not worried yet, honestly; she had some kind of break on the case she was working for Valentine, and he woke up just enough to notice her sliding into and out of bed last night, so he knows she came back for a few hours, at least. Left him breakfast on the counter when she went, too. Best fake wife a man could ask for.

(It was a box of salisbury steak that he threw away about five seconds after opening, but still- it's the thought that counts.)

He spends the morning eating a leisurely breakfast at Power Noodles and then browsing through the markets close enough to keep his eye on the goings-on at the Dugout. When the day shows no signs of producing his missing runner, though, he decides to call it. The mouthy fuck from the first day weaseled his way into Bobrov's good graces, and there's a girl with a sly smile who's currently doing an excellent impression of a very grumpy security guard that patrols this section, so they're about as covered as they can be in case their runner is just held up. And if it's not just a delay- well, there's a lot of dangers out there in the Commonwealth, any one of which could stop someone from making the trek into the city. And once those have been ruled out, Deacon will have another thread to tug.

He does start to get a little worried when Whisper doesn't manage to surface by lunchtime. It's not like her to go off the reservation like this, even when she's working on something else. They've done tandem ops since they partnered up, even gone off on solo work when the job or her minimal remaining commitments to the Minutemen called for it, but even then, she'd never go dark for this long without giving him some heads-up about it. And it's been a fair few months since they've worked separate at all.

He stops, frowning, as he thinks about that. That can't be right, can it? He mentally counts back, and- April. April was the last time he took a job solo. It was a couple weeks after the job at Zimoja, and he had to split off to read in some new mid-level runners that one of his recruiters had flagged, and she'd gone to Goodneighbor, said she was running an errand for Hancock. They'd met back at HQ a few days later, and she'd had a truly creative collection of bruises on her face and such a huge grin that he hadn't even bothered to complain about how it'd make undercover work harder. They'd picked up a round of stimpaks and a combat run off PAM and headed out the next day, and hadn't separated since. Now that he's thinking about it, they hadn't worked solo too often before that, either.

April. Huh.

He spends the afternoon restocking on supplies, getting them ready for their planned early-morning exodus. But by the time dinner rolls around and he still hasn’t seen her, he’s moved past idly worried into properly concerned. If nothing else, Whisper can usually be credited with a little more dedication to a cover, and they’ve spent the entire week playing a besotted couple, attached at the hip and pleased as punch about it. He’s browsed through these market stalls holding her hand or tucking her under his arm, let her nuzzle her head onto his shoulder and pressed kisses against her forehead, her temple, her cheek, all to the indulgent smiles of shopkeepers and the rolled eyes of security guards. And now for her to disappear for so long- it doesn’t look good. Especially on their last night in town. Not really the note he wants to leave on, not when they’ll almost certainly have to come back and use these covers again in the future. And she’d have to know that, too. It’s not like her.

He even tries the comm line, when the midsummer sun is going down and she’s still not back at her place or anywhere else he can figure, but there’s no answer on the other end, just static. She doesn’t have it turned on. Which isn’t a surprise, it’s not like they had any agreement to use them, not when they’d more or less planned not to separate. But he can’t help but wonder- what if something happened? What if her cover got blown, or she had a relapse into fever, or she got hurt chasing down Vadim Bobrov’s missing bartender? Anyone in the city would have heard about Olivia’s new husband and come to track him down, but the case may have taken them outside of the city gates. He’d like to think that she’d be smart enough to let him know, but she can run with blinkers on sometimes, if she’s focused enough. Without him to remind her to stop and play out all the angles, she might have gotten in over her head.

Anything could have happened, and he wouldn’t have heard about it.

The sign above Valentine’s office is bright red, hard to miss even in daylight but cartoonishly bright in the gathering darkness. Deacon might have gone for something a little more subtle, but he supposes that a private detective who’s also a synth can’t be too choosy about his clients. Half of ‘em are probably too Jet-jittery to focus on anything less shiny. Even here in Diamond City, chemi-heads are still going to be the best business in town when it comes to the missing, lost, and desperate.

Deacon does like the heart logo, though. It works pretty well with the whole pre-war, dime-novel crime-serial aesthetic. And Deacon's always gotta appreciate a man who knows how to work the branding.

Inside, the office is the kind of small that’s optimistically described as “cozy” and full of enough furniture to border on claustrophobic. The short, friendly-looking woman putting something away in one of the filing cabinets looks like she’s used to it. He wonders if he should clear his throat to get her attention, but she looks up when the door clicks shut behind him, and doesn’t startle at the sight of a stranger appearing relatively silently into her space, just looks him over with a practiced eye and puts on her best sympathetic smile. “I’m sorry, sir, we’re closed for the night. If you need Mr. Valentine you can come back in the morning, I’m sure he’ll be happy to help.”

Deacon’s sure he will, too. Valentine’s famous for taking on every sad-sack that comes through his door, to the point where he probably wouldn’t be able to pay his pretty secretary if he needed things like food and sleep to keep going. “I won’t take up much of his time,” he says, in John’s gruff voice. “I’m lookin’ for someone, got a feeling Valentine knows where to find ‘em.”

The secretary’s sympathy gets a little more genuine. “Missing persons are a specialty,” she says. “Who you lookin’ for, hon?”

“My wife,” Deacon says, twisting his hands together in front of him. “I heard she was last seen here?”

The secretary blinks. “Here? Why, the only person to come through here today was-”

“A friend,” Valentine says, from behind him. Deacon controls his instinctive flinch of surprise (how the hell did he not hear him back there?) and when he turns around, the good detective emerges from the alcove behind the door from where he’d been sitting. Sitting quietly enough that Deacon hadn’t spotted him when he first came in, and- no breath. That’s why he hadn’t twigged on Deacon’s radar. When he goes still, he goes _entirely_ still in a way a human can’t quite mimic. Interesting.

There’s a couch tucked away back there in the corner, a coffee table in front of it covered with files. He’s been working. “Thanks, Ellie. I got it from here.”

Ellie eyes him with a look that’s a lot more speculative than sympathetic, now, but she nods and says, “Sure thing, boss. See you tomorrow?”

“See you tomorrow, El,” Valentine says easily, his yellow eyes never wavering from Deacon’s. There’s a rustle of fabric as she grabs her purse, a quick-footed _shush_ of her sneakered feet on the floorboards, and the faintly spicy smell from her perfume as she passes behind him. Only when the door shuts behind her, however, does Nick say, “Well well well. So you’re this ‘husband’ I’ve heard so much about.”

Valentine’s too classy too actually put air quotes around “husband,” but he leans on the word just enough that he might as well have done. Polite enough to let the lie stand, for now. Straightforward enough to make sure that they’re on the same page. Even if he’s not a hundred percent sure who Deacon works for, it’s close enough for government work. Which, fair enough. All things considered, how many clandestine organizations could Whisper be working for, anyway?

Too bad, though. Anyone Whisper would claim as a friend, Deacon figured might be a little more willing to play a little more cloak and dagger. “Only good things, I hope,” John says, with the tight, faintly anxious smile of a man meeting his wife’s acquaintance for the first time. _Gonna play along?_ “I’ve heard great things about you.”

“Well, you know Liv,” Valentine says easily. His steady, unblinking yellow gaze is tremendously disconcerting, Deacon’s gotta hand it to him. Maybe part of it is because generally if he’s used to seeing a synth’s eyes he knows he needs to run the other way in a big goddamn hurry, but he doesn’t think so. He thinks Valentine knows exactly how unsettling that is. Something tells him that the man knows how to play human a lot better when he wants to. “She’s a font of compliments. Kept pretty closed-mouth about you, though. Guess I can figure out why.”

_Okay, fair enough,_ Deacon thinks. Apparently Valentine’s willingness not to ask questions doesn’t extend much further than Whisper. Which is… interesting in its own right. Valentine’s not the type to get attached.

But hey. Deacon can play nice, when he wants to. “Guess you can,” he says, letting himself drop back into his actual voice. Valentine arches an eyebrow (eyebrow plate? Eyebrow line? What do you call them when- Never mind), but otherwise doesn’t react, aside from a faintly satisfied smirk. _Yeah, yeah, you won that round._ “I actually am looking for her, for what it’s worth. I haven’t seen her since yesterday, when she left to go work with you. I know she came home last night, but…” He trails off leadingly.

“Ah,” Valentine says, and sighs. Some of the wary tension bleeds out of his frame, and he pulls a pack of cigarettes out of his coat pocket, shakes one out and offers it to Deacon. “You smoke?”

“I’m not adverse,” Deacon admits, and takes it, more curious than anything about how it’s going to play out. There’s a little pool of silence while Valentine shakes out another for himself, pulls out a lighter and lights up for both of them, and then Deacon breathes deep, lets the nicotine settle into his lungs. Fuck, it’s been a while. You can’t keep up a smoker’s habit and run for your life on a regular basis- but damn, wouldn’t it be nice.

He exhales a plume of smoke and sighs. “So, everything okay? We’re supposed to head out tomorrow, but I can delay for a day if she needs it.”

“I don’t know, honestly,” Valentine says, and he looks pretty damned frustrated about it, too. “She said she was fine, but you know Liv.” It’s the same phrase as from a few minutes before, but now it’s tinged with an exasperated fondness that Deacon can entirely sympathize with. “She’d say the same damn thing if she was bleeding out on the floor in front of you.”

That particular choice of phrasing is a little too on-the-nose for Deacon, considering how the last few weeks have gone. He covers his short, involuntarily breath of alarm by bringing the cigarette up to his lips. “Something happened?”

“Oh, something happened, all right.” Valentine takes a heavy drag off his cigarette and exhales smoke in an unsteady plume. “You know how she was looking into Vadim’s missing bartender? Well, it turns out the poor schmuck didn't have the greatest luck with the ladies, and decided to go to Doc Crocker to get himself a new face. The good doctor took a double hit right before surgery, got the jitters and nicked an artery. He was chopping the guy up for the butcher’s trash pile when we walked in.”

Deacon thinks back to the shuttered door of the Surgery Center, the jittery-looking guard who'd been stationed near the entrance. It hadn't been a concern to him at the time; Dave's the twitchiest guard in DC, so it wasn't exactly unusual. Plus, Doc Crocker was famous for opening late, since he tended to stay up all night at the bar, hitting the bottle, hitting on younger women, and hitting the Jet too hard. It's the sort of lifestyle that tended to go hand-in-hand with sleeping in. By the time Deacon would have expected the Surgery Center to be open for the day, he was already on the other side of the market, bartering with crazy Myrna and trying not to worry about Whisper. It didn't occur to him that-

"Ah," he says eloquently, and Valentine grimaces.

"'Yeah. Liv tried to talk him down, but apparently 'suicide by private detective' was a better option. He had Psycho and a scalpel, Liv only had a boot knife, I couldn’t a clean shot… It was messy. Real messy.”

_Aww, fuck._ Doc Crocker wasn’t always the steadiest hand, but he used to be pretty reliable, in his way. A lot of Deacon’s work was under his knife. He can’t help but picture what it must have looked like, when it was done. Close quarters, blades- must have been like a goddamn slaughterhouse in there. _Fuck._ He leaves her alone for _one goddamn day_ and look what happens.

“Liv,” he says, urgently. The name feels sideways and wrong in his mouth, for all he’s been using it for a week already. “She’s okay?”

Valentine sighs. “Psycho’s not worth much if you’re too high to hold a scalpel steady. Crocker got in a hit on her arm, but that was it. Same spot as the scars she already got from that deathclaw. She was already cracking jokes about it when Sun stitched her up.”

_Deathclaw,_ Deacon thinks, storing that away to think about later. He’d figured whatever marked up her arms must’ve been a tad bigger than a molerat, considering how badly she’d been torn up, but a _deathclaw._ Holy shit. Carrington always said she was lucky to still have use of her hands, considering the depth of the scarring. If only he knew.

Goddamn. Every time Deacon learns something new about her, it just leaves him wanting more. He's not used to being out of the loop when it comes to people, and he spends more time with her than literally anyone else. How does she still manage to keep surprising him? Even after all this time?

“Yeah, that sounds like Liv,” Deacon says. If the irony lies a little heavy on his tongue, well, he's confident enough that Valentine won't notice. “That would’ve been last night, though. Or- really early morning, I guess. Was she with you all day?”

“Security most of the morning, giving a report,” Valentine sighs. “And then she went off on her own. I was figuring she went and found you, but since you’re here…”

“Yeah,” Deacon says. “Not so much. You got any ideas where she might have gone?”

Valentine rubs a hand across his jaw- well, the intact side of his jaw. It’s a tremendously human gesture, for a man who will never grow any kind of facial hair, never feel any itch. _Pure muscle memory._ “Pretty much any place I’d suggest you’d’ve already looked, I’m guessing. Normally I’d say check the newspaper, but with Piper and her sister out of town, there’s not much there for her. She’s not the type to get a drink when she’s had a bad day, so…” He trails off and looks thoughtfully at the ceiling. “Did you check the roof?”

Deacon tilts his head. “Let’s go with no.”

“Of her place,” Valentine clarifies. “There’s a roof hatch in the top. Old Tom, the fella that owned the place before her, he dragged some chairs and tables up there, even a grill. Liv says it’s the closest thing to fresh air you can find in Diamond City, likes to go up there sometimes to think. I’d look there.”

_Of course she’s on the roof,_ Deacon thinks. Just as water will always roll downhill, if there’s higher ground somewhere, Whisper will find it. It’s like her least endearing trait. “Thanks,” he says, and holds out his hand to shake. “Appreciate it.”

Valentine parks his cigarette in the corner of his mouth and reaches out and takes it- left-handed, Deacon notices, forcing Deacon to switch hands, since he’d reached out with his right. Doesn’t like to touch people with the metal one, if he had to guess. His grip is firm, not too hard or too light, though Deacon’s heard that he’s built more along the lines of a Gen 2, strong enough to crush bones if he needed. His skin feels more like worn leather than plastic. It’s only a couple of degrees cooler than human. “You’re welcome,” Valentine says, and gives him a firm shake. “Glad I got a chance to say hi. It’s good that Liv’s got someone looking out for her.”

It’s friendly, not probing, not even particularly pushing- which is interesting in and of itself, honestly. There's no way he's not curious, but he's not asking. Whisper wasn't kidding. Apparently all she had to do was say "It's business" and Valentine just lets it go.

_You definitely should've taken Charmer as your code name,_ he thinks. “I do my best,” he says, which at least has the advantage of being honest. “Sorry about the circumstances.”

“Me too.” Valentine sighs, sending out another plume of smoke. “You know, I should’ve known better than to get Liv involved, with everything else she’s got goin’ on. Last time I asked her for a favor on a case, we ended up having to shoot our way through Fanuil Hall. Odds being what they are, I should have known this one wouldn’t end clean.”

Huh. So _that’s_ why the route from Diamond City suddenly got a lot easier about a month before Whisper joined them. They’d been considering sending Glory out for it, but it never got high enough on the priority list for them to bother. When the place suddenly turned up empty, everyone had better things to do than find out why. He should have figured Whisper was involved with it somehow.

“You’ll have to tell me about that one sometime,” he says, and touches two fingers to his forehead in a friendly salute. “Thanks.”

“Hey, wait a second,” Valentine says, and Deacon pauses, halfway to the door. The detective goes over to his desk and roots around in the drawers for a minute, comes up with a small handful of metal pieces pooled in his intact hand. “I’ve been holding onto these for a while now, but I’ve got a feeling they’ll see a bit better use with you.”

Deacon holds out his palm, and Valentine carefully spills the metal bits into it. Some of them are melted slightly on the circuits from an energy rifle, and the biggest one is pockmarked from what looks like a shotgun blast, but nothing is damaged enough that Deacon can’t recognize Institute tech when he’s holding it. There’s still blood on some of the joints. Real human blood, not coolant.

“Is this-”

“From Kellogg,” Valentine finishes grimly. “All that’s left of him, now. I’ve been trying to give ‘em back to Liv, but she won’t even think about it. Not that I blame her, but-” He sighs. Scratches the back of his neck. “Look. The man was barely human there at the end, and I would know. Most of it got- pretty damaged, by the time we could take him down, but this was what we could pry out more or less intact. I know it’s not much, but there’s got to be _something_ useful in there.” He stubs out his cigarette into the overflowing ashtray on the corner of his desk and shoves his hands in the pockets of his coat. “I dunno who you are, or who you work for- though I got a pretty good idea, all things considered. But Liv trusts you. So. Get her to take them, give them to your people, whatever. At least make sure that old bastard’s death didn’t go to waste. You hear?”

Deacon slowly curls his fingers around the parts and slides them into his coat pocket. It’s probably the most valuable cargo he’s ever carried. “Yeah, I hear you. I’ll take good care of ‘em.”

“Take good care of _Liv,_ ” Valentine says. “That’s a hell of a woman you’ve got in your corner, John. I hope you appreciate her.”

“Yeah,” Deacon says. “I do my best.”

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Deacon tries to look up to the roof when he gets back to Whisper’s house, but if she’s up there, he can’t see a damn thing. No big surprise. Even this close to the market, the lights don’t reach up to the third story very well, and he’s got seven months worth of missions under his belt that all tell him that if she doesn’t want to be spotted, she won’t be.

The roof hatch is off the little landing that serves as her bathroom. He scales the ladder quickly, relieved when he sticks his head up and finds that the upper part of the roof is mostly enclosed. There’s even a railing around the outer edge for nervous nellies like him. Whisper’s sitting halfway under it, her legs dangling off into open space. Because of course she is.

He makes his way across the roof and settles down gingerly next to her, cross-legged and facing away from the edge. Whisper gives him a sideways look and smiles.

“I promise it’s structurally sound, you know. I checked it myself.”

“That’s real thoughtful of you, partner,” he says. The railing _feels_ solid against his back. Still, after the first nervous press he mostly braces himself on his palms and calls it close enough. “I’m just a little happier if I don’t have to _look_ at all the space between me and certain death.”

“There’s another roof right below this one, you know,” she says. “You’d fall, like, two feet.” He glares, and she holds up her hands innocently. The lights from the market glint off the ointment on her left arm, and he can see the marching black line of Doc Sun's neat, tight stitches. Defensive wound; she threw up her arm to protect her face. It's right next to the primary tendon; another half-inch to the left, and she'd've lost the use of her hand. “Hey. Just sayin’.”

_Never should have let you go off on your own,_ he thinks, but that's not right either. Carrington's matching stitches in her shoulder happened on his watch; it's a cost of doing business in this life. “All I get is disrespect from you."

She gives him a sweet smile rather than reply, and his nagging sense of worry deepens. Code name aside, she's generally not actually that quiet- and she _definitely_ never passes up a chance to banter back, especially when he's handed her such an easy opening. His brow creases with concern, and he opens his mouth to ask- he's not sure, really, but she looks away before he gets the chance. Back down to her lap, with whatever she's fidgeting with.

He leans over slightly to get a better look at whatever it is. It's covered in a soft cloth, but Whisper obligingly shifts the cover away when she notices him peering over her shoulder, revealing a very familiar-looking pistol.

Deacon looks from Tommy Whispers' old gun back up to his partner. "I didn't even know you still had this," he says quietly. He's never once seen her use it- handguns aren't really her specialty; if she's close enough to do damage with one she'll usually just close and use her boot knife instead. He halfway figured she'd dumped it in storage somewhere, or sold it off to Arturo or one of the other collectors that would pay top-dollar for a pre-war relic like the Deliverer.

"Of course," she says, a little surprised. "Gets kind of scuffed up down at the bottom of my pack, though. I take it out every once in awhile to clean it. Gives me time to think."

She offers it to him, butt-first, and he takes it, checking the slide to her approving smile and rubbing his thumb over the initials carved on the handle. "T.W." Tommy had been so frickin' proud of this thing. Bugged Tinker for upgrades all the time. Used to pose like something out of a pre-war movie poster. Glory would laugh so hard-

Well. Glory doesn't laugh much anymore, does she.

"It's good that you're taking care of it," he says, and hands it back. There's probably people who could use it better, even people who need it more. But it felt right to give it her, down there in the Switchboard. He wasn't entirely sure why he did it at the time, but it still feels right, and Deacon's long ago learned to trust his instincts. "And I heard you might have had a bit of an adventure to think about."

She takes it back, gives the handle one last rub of the polishing cloth- right over the initials, he notes, the same place he just touched- and then wraps it up carefully and sets it aside. "Nick told you?"

"Hey, what makes you think I went to see your pal Valentine, huh? Maybe I figured it out on my own."

"I saw you coming around the corner," she says, with something like a smile. "Also? You smell like an ashtray."

He makes a show of sniffing himself and grimaces. "You might have a point there."

"Nick's the only one I know who smokes that brand of cheap tar cigarettes. Probably because he doesn't have to worry about filling his lungs with poison."

Upon reflection, Deacon does feel a little queasy with it. Ah, well. "Yeah, I was wondering about that," he says. "Does he even have lungs? How does he inhale? I assume his voice comes from a modulator box like Gen 2, so-"

She shoves at him- gently, in deference to their place near the railing- and laughs. "'Ours is not to wonder why,'" she quotes back at him softly. "Don't think so much, partner. He wants to smoke, so he does. Ask too many questions and you ruin the magic."

"I can think of a number of people who would take this opportunity to remind you that it's not magic, it's science."

"Good thing they're not on this roof, then," she says, and he laughs and butts his shoulder against hers. She sighs and leans into it.

"Want to talk about it?" he says.

"Not so much," she says, but there's that tension in her body that means that if she doesn't want to talk about it, she definitely wants to talk about something. He waits.

"I'm guessing Nick told you about Kellogg."

He awards himself a mental point. "'Told me about' might be a strong way of putting it," he says. Lying to pretend he has more information might be a faster way to get her to open up, but it's too easy to backfire on him if it goes sideways, and while she generally doesn't care much about him lying he has a feeling now would be an exception. People tend to care a lot more when it's personal. "He gave me the… remains, I guess you could say."

"He did?" She looks up at his face, then back down at her lap when he nods. "Huh. Must've been getting desperate."

"He said you wouldn't take them."

"There's not a damn thing I wanted to take from that old bastard. No matter how useful it might be."

Her voice is still soft, but there's a suppressed anger vibrating underneath that's… new. Whisper doesn't really have much of a temper, in the general run of things. Sure, she'll get frustrated, or annoyed- generally at stupid or incompetent people who make her life harder- but angry isn't generally in her repertoire. Just as well; he's been informed that he can be, on occasion, just a bit infuriating. If she had more of a temper she'd probably have stabbed him a long time ago.

But Kellogg. It's been over a year since she killed him, and the thought of him still makes her so angry that he can hear it in her voice, see it in the flex of her hands fisted around the railing, feel it in the tense line of her shoulder against his. Kellogg makes her _furious._

It's an in. It's an opening, and maybe if Deacon were a better person he'd leave it be and let her tell him on her own terms, but he's not a good person. And he desperately, desperately wants to know.

"You never did tell me why you took him out."

His tone is gentle, not probing, but it nets him a cautious little sideways look anyway. "I figured you knew that one already."

_Careful,_ he tells himself. "I keep telling you, partner-"

"You don't know everything. I know. But I figured this one would have landed on your radar." She lets out a sigh and lolls her head back, looks up at the stars rather than at him. "Although I guess it wouldn't've, considering…"

Considering _what,_ he wants to know, but pushing that line of inquiry is pretty low on his list of priorities just now. When she doesn't show any sign of continuing, he says lightly, "Well, if you wanna give me a hint, I suppose I could always-"

"He killed my husband," Whisper interrupts. Her voice is frighteningly flat, stripped of all its usual color and life. All that's left is a terrible resignation. "Right in front of me. And took my son."

Deacon goes very, very still. He always knew it had to be something like that, something _personal-_ everyone in the Railroad has a story, and she hasn't been in the Commonwealth long enough to have learned the hatred of the Institute any other way. And her stretch marks, the way she'd shy away from children- he knew she had one, somewhere. Knew that there had to be another parent for that child. It's not- entirely a surprise.

But to have her _tell_ him-

"I'm sorry," he says, because it's what you say in times like these. Because there's nothing else you _can_ say. Then something else occurs to him, accompanied by a feeling not unlike a rock sinking down into his guts. "Kellogg was here in Diamond City with a kid last year. Was that-"

"It might've been," she says. Still so quiet, so calm. Unnaturally calm. "A little old to be him, but- doesn't really matter now."

"He-" Deacon says, and she nods, shortly.

"Shaun's dead."

_Shaun,_ he thinks, _her son's name was Shaun,_ and spares a minute to be desperately grateful that he's never used the name for any of his covers. And then the rest of the statement hits him. "Aww, Whisper," he says, because _I'm sorry_ isn't big enough for this. Nothing's big enough for this. He's spent twenty years mourning the loss of the _possibility_ and how much worse it must be, to have had a child of your own, held him in your arms and promised him that you'd look after him, promised that you'd show him the best the world had to offer and then-

"It's fine," she says, in a way that is manifestly _not_ _fine_. "Kellogg told me, before I killed him. I had my gun to his head and I thought- I honestly thought I might be able to finally get an answer. Thought I might finally be able to find him, but Kellogg told me it was too late." She swallows hard, and forcibly relaxes her white-knuckled grip on the railing. "I actually think he was being kind, in his way. I think he just didn't want me getting my hopes up. It was thoughtful, considering. You know. That I was about to unload a clip into his face."

"Whisper-" he says, helplessly. She puts her hand on his knee. Almost like _she's_ comforting _him._

"It's okay," she says, with a little crook of a smile that doesn't look very happy at all. "I'm not telling you for sympathy, or anything like that. Everyone's got their tragedy. I'm not special."

_I beg to fucking differ._

"I'm telling you to- explain, I guess. I know I should have brought those to you. Or Tinker. Or- whoever. I've been with the Railroad long enough to know what those could mean to us. I just- I couldn't. I-"

"Hey, Whisper, hey," he says, and he's got a hand on her back before he entirely realizes that he's going to move, his palm broad and warm between her shoulder blades. She feels like a lump of granite under his hand, all of her muscles strung tight enough he can almost hear the twanging noise. "No, partner, it's not like that."

"Isn't like what?"

He kneads the pads of his fingers into her back, her shoulders, lets his thumb stroke along the bared knob of her spine. "You don't owe us anything."

She sighs. "Feels like maybe I do."

"Well, quit it," he says, a lot more lightly than he feels. Sometime later, sometime when he doesn't have her attention on him and every word counts, he's going to take the time to process this, think about the way she never slows down, the way she gets her back up like nothing else when someone suggests that _maybe_ she might want to take a break, the way that she just takes everything they hand to her and always asks for more. Because she likes the work, yeah. They wouldn't be partners still if she didn't. But for other reasons, too. He’s a little too familiar with what "too little, too late" feels like when you've gotta face yourself in the mirror, and he knows damn well how it can fuck up your perspective.

_Guess I'll have to tell Dez she was right after all._ Never mind, he'll have time to worry about that later. "You're like, the Railroad MVP, partner. If you try much harder you're gonna make us all look bad, and then where would we be, huh?"

"Can't have me showing the rest of you up, is that what you're telling me?" The little twitch of a smile on the corner of her mouth is a sad country cousin to the usual good humor than she wears like a crown, but he'll take it.

"Look, we've worked hard to get this far," he tells her earnestly. His hand drops away from her back in order to gesture more elaborately. "Lack of self-esteem is the real killer, you know? People want to feel needed, partner, and that's a fundamental fact. You swanning around, being too competent all the time, it's just too much for people. Why do you think I keep us out of HQ so much? I don't want to leave a trail of broken spirits behind us. It's professional courtesy, really."

He's got more- Deacon is fully ready, willing, and able to bullshit for hours on a moment's notice, for causes a lot less important than this one- but the little crook of a smile is blooming wider now, into something closer to real amusement. If it's not quite up to its usual standards- well, Deacon's not a goddamn miracle worker. "You don't seem too broken to me," she points out.

"Yeah, but only because I, too, am too magnificent for lesser mortals to comprehend," he agrees. "I don't just keep out of HQ to save them from you, partner. It's also to save them from myself. And the two of us together-" He mimes an explosion.

"Well, I can't deny _that._ "

The banter is good, but it's somewhat ruined by the way she chases it with a sigh, then slowly lists sideways until her head is resting on his shoulder. She's still facing out, towards the city, and he looks down at the slumped curve of her neck, the fringe of hair stuck to her nape in the midsummer heat. Slowly, he brings up one hand to cup it with his palm, and she leans back into his grip with a sigh.

_You don't want me for this,_ he wants to tell her. _I'm no good for comfort. All I ever learned how to do is keep moving until everything's road dust in the rearview mirror._

But her hand on his knee tightens into a squeeze, almost like reassurance, and then she leans up to press a kiss to the hinge of his jaw. "Thanks," she says into his skin, and then she's straightening away, rolling to her feet with an elaborate stretch that would have him eyeing her with admiration on a normal day. Her working gear is loosely fitted, but not _that_ loose. "Listen, about the stuff Nick gave you-"

"He really just wanted me to give them back to to you-"

"Yeah, but nah," she says. Because he's watching for it, he can see her pulling on an air of normalcy like a cloak, and his heart hurts a little at how practiced she is at doing it. And if it rings a little hollow at the moment- Well. He has faith in her ability to sell a cover. Even to herself. "They shouldn't be mine, just because I was lucky enough to be the one to shoot him in the face. Give them to someone who can make something out of them."

"Whisper," Deacon says, looking up at her, trying to catch her eyes, but she just drops down a hand, gives the top of his head an affectionate rub. Her smile is almost like real, now.

"His death should mean something," she says. "Everyone's should. And if we can make it something that spits in the face of everything he ever worked for? That'll do one better."

"Well," Deacon says, and lets himself lean into the warmth of her hand. Who's here to judge, up here on the roof with just the two of them alone in the world? "I guess I can't argue with that."

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Late that night, Deacon sits at Whisper's desk and looks over the parts from Valentine while his partner snores safely away on the floor above him. Cleaned of blood, he can even make sense out of some of them- this looks like it was meant to stabilize a knee joint, this looks like it might have been an artificial heart valve- but some of the others are incomprehensible. No matter. Tinker and Carrington will be able to piece them out, between the two of them. Knowing Tinker, they might even be able to reverse-engineer some of it. It could help them so much, to have some of their people come back from injuries that otherwise would have put them out of the field entirely. With tech like this, they might even have something to offer the people of the Commonwealth. Something that might turn the tide in their favor.

But the real prize is the piece that Deacon is currently turning over in his hands. It's small- about the size of his thumb- and there are a number of loose wires trailing out of the ends. It could have been for anything, but Deacon's a little too familiar with brain matter not to recognize it when he's cleaning it off the connections, even dried from long storage. This was the Institute's window into the mind of their most faithful attack dog. Maybe even how they controlled him- if he'd even needed controlling with anything more than a paycheck. This could be the most valuable piece of intel they'd ever gotten on the workings of the Institute, depending on what Dr. Amari could pull off it. It might be tremendously out of date.

It might not.

He stares at it for a long moment, then sweeps the rest into one of Tinker's special anti-surveillance bags and stows it in his pack. The brainbox he puts in Whisper's, tucked away in the same inner pocket where she keeps the wedding rings she probably thinks he doesn't know about. He's careful to do up her pack exactly the way he found it, even the uneven way she likes to lace the outer straps, and then blows out the lamp before he climbs the steps to the loft.

She stirs slightly as he slides underneath the blanket next to her. "It's me," he murmurs, and she rolls over, hooks her ankle over his to keep him in place, and cracks one eye open.

"We good for tomorrow?"

"You know it," he says, and nudges his nose against hers, affectionate. "Back to sleep. I know Doc Sun told you to rest up after your stitch job earlier."

"'kay," she says indistinctly, and obediently curls back down into her pillow. He slings his arm around her waist, presses his face into her hair, and slides down into a deep, dreamless sleep.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

She's gone the next morning when he wakes up, and Deacon allows himself to panic only very slightly before he catches the faint sounds of someone moving around downstairs. It's not like her to wake up before him, given how bad she tends to be at mornings. He _was_ up later than she was last night, a rarity given that she tends to take second watch when they need to, and they tend to go to bed together when they don't. He'd been trying to give her space, considering how heavy the conversation had gotten, but maybe-

Something clatters, and he remembers way too late that she's not the only one with keys to her place. _Fuck. You're getting too comfortable, old man._ He slides his hand down to his boot knife, waiting-

"Sorry about that!" Whisper calls up a moment later, and he relaxes. "Pot got away from me."

He blinks up at the ceiling. "You're cooking breakfast?"

"Don't sound so shocked," she calls back, sounding amused. "You've got time to wash first if you want."

"Roger that."

The bathroom isn't exactly what he'd call extensive, but he takes a piss and scrubs up as best he can at the sink, squinting at his reflection in the warped and blotchy mirror on the wall. He got a shave at the barber the first morning here, but it's starting to come back in pretty solidly. He doesn't exactly have any shaving soap in his pack at the moment, and if Whisper's got any in the house, he hasn't been able to find it. Well, time enough for that back at HQ.

There's a scrap of fabric draped over one corner, still damp from when Whisper had her wash earlier. Deacon's a little surprised that he slept through the splashing- and then a little concerned that she was apparently making the effort to keep from waking him. On the rare occasions she _has_ woken up first previously, she tends to throw things at his head until he joins her. If she was letting him sleep, maybe it was because she was trying to avoid him for a little longer.

Not that he would blame her if she did. Deacon's the last person with any room to judge about avoidance of personal issues. All the same, it doesn't make the idea sit any lighter in his belly.

But if Whisper's still feeling the strain from their too-honest conversation the night before, she doesn't show it when he comes downstairs. She's frying something over the little stove and boogieing along to the Diamond City radio on the counter behind her, humming along under her breath and wiggling her butt in a way he can't help but stop halfway down the steps to admire. It's not really… dancing, technically. But it's a damn attractive close cousin, especially given the way that her oversized long johns tend to cling to the curvier places.

"They call me the wanderer," she sings along, in her low clear voice. "Yeeeah, the wanderer, I roam around, around, around-"

He clears his throat gently. "That's a good look for you."

If he was hoping for a flinch, he's disappointed: she just twists around enough to give him a smile- Olivia's smile, all cocky charm. She beckons him over with her free hand. "Much better with a partner, baby."

_So. That's how she's going to play it._

"Darlin', I believe we have established that while my skills are legion, dancing is not one of them," he says, but he's already coming the rest of the way down the steps and across the room. She grins back over her shoulder as he comes up behind her. "This is a risky undertaking right here. Your toes may never recover."

"Feels plenty safe to me," she says. She gives a satisfied little sigh he feels in his belly when he puts his hands to her hips, lets his body fall into the natural sway of hers. Easy as breathing. It's always so goddamn easy with her. "I think you've got this, babe."

"Livin' on the edge," he mutters into her hair, just to be contrary, but she just laughs, grooving side-to-side with him and humming along to the radio.

Eventually the song runs out, and he reaches out and flips off the radio before the next one can start, but otherwise doesn't move away from his position draped across her back. She gives a pleased hum and flips whatever it is that she's frying in the pan. "Running a little on the slow side this morning, aren't'cha? You ever heard the one about the early bird getting the worm?"

"And the lazy bird gets his wife to cook breakfast for him," Deacon retorts, stifling a yawn. It's not that late, anyway, if the time he's seeing on her Pip-boy is correct. Not exactly the dawn departure they were planning on, but for once there's nowhere urgent they need to be. They've got the time. "What _is_ for breakfast, anyway?"

"Fried tatos," she said. "Plus other stuff."

"What kinda stuff?"

"Vegetables?"

"I can hear the question mark in your voice, you know." He hooks his chin over her shoulder and considers the messy pile of food currently turning golden brown in the pan. He can pick out the carrots on color alone, but the other fixings are of somewhat more dubious antecedents. "No bacon? I didn't know you knew how to make a meal that wasn't ninety percent charred meat."

"Rude," she chides. "I don't hear you complaining when I shoot, dress, and cook all that meat for you, you bottomless pit. Unless 'wordless grunts of hunger' count as complaints, now."

He very possibly resembles that remark. "I'm not complaining!" he says. He slides his hands around across her belly and hugs himself more heavily onto her back, nosing against her temple. Man, she smells good. Sort of clean and spicy. "I'm just sayin', Annie Oakley, that there _is_ a butcher shop in town. Diamond City Radio informs me that they have the freshest cuts in town."

She grimaces. "Yeah. Unfortunately, Earl Sterling was… not so much."

It takes a minute to remember the name. Vadim's missing bartender, the one Doc Crocker apparently left in pieces until Whisper found him. Oh, ugh. Left to rot in that tiny little basement, especially in the midsummer heat- "Yeah, can't blame you for wanting to avoid meat for a bit."

"So glad you approve." She's still smiling, however, despite her acerbic tone. He can feel it against his cheek and awards himself a mental point. Things can't be too bad if he can still get her to smile. "This is just about done. Grab the plates for me, will ya, babe?"

He presses an absent kiss to the shell of her ear and peels himself away, grabbing a pair of chipped metal plates and a couple of forks out of the crowded little cabinet to the right. He holds the plates out with a mocking flourish and she piles them high with food that actually smells pretty damn good, then drops the pan in the sink and steals back her portion. They eat standing up in the little kitchen, fighting for elbow room and trading back and forth a bottle of watered-down mutfruit cider they were planning on finishing with dinner last night. After they're done she scruffs her hand across the top of his head and leaves him heartlessly to deal with the dishes, grabbing her pack and heading upstairs to change into her travelling gear before he can object.

He shakes his head after her and starts scrubbing. Fair enough. His life isn't exactly full of a lot of opportunities to exercise his inner domestic goddess, but even he knows that whoever cooks doesn't have to do the washing-up. He was always the one who cooked, before, and Barbara used to complain so much about-

_Nope,_ he thinks, and scrubs harder.

His mind's mostly clear again by the time she comes thumping back down the stairs, wearing her usual working gear rather than the more casual jeans and t-shirt combo she's had on for most of the week. Of course, they're going outside the safety of the great green walls; she's going to need to armor up. It's a little jarring, the way it always is when you start to come out of a character you've been in for a while, but it's also sort of... reassuring. She's still got her hair slicked back and Olivia's trademark too-big sunglasses sliding down her nose, but she still looks like his partner. Not his wife.

_His cover's wife._ Shit. All week, he was doing so well, and then-

"Hey," she says, and shoves the sunglasses up till they're perched on top of her head. "All set?"

"The dishes have been defeated," he says. "Hoo-rah."

"Very macho," she teases, and comes to brush a kiss across his cheek. "Good husband."

He wants to close his eyes against it, but it's too much of a tell. _Not her problem, not her problem._ "Well, I try," he drawls, as obnoxiously as possible, and changes the subject. "You look like you're about ready to hit the road."

"Just about, yeah. You?"

"You know me, babe, I'm always ready to go." She gives a little snerk of laughter at that, which- _rude._ That's only happened once- okay, maybe twice. But only once that she noticed, which is really all that counts, and anyway-

He pauses and rewinds a moment, then wants to smack himself in the forehead. _Babe._ Damn it, he's usually faster to shift gears. For all she still technically looks like Olivia, for all her teasing, he can feel the difference. And for once, he's the one who's failing to keep up.

He clears his throat and puts on his best offended look, hoping she won't have noticed. "Hey now. You've only seen me caught with my pants down that one time, and if I recall you were right there with me, pal."

_There, that sounded better._

"You're forgetting something. You'd gotten my shirt off, but _I_ still had my pants on. Which was why I was able to kill the thing while you were still hopping around like an idiot trying to get to your boot knife." She gives him an earnest smile, all faux-sympathy. "It's so sad how your memory's the first thing to go when you get old."

Argh. "That's just hurtful," he informs her. Damn it, he's not _old._ He's… experienced. "My feelings, they are hurt."

"I'm sure they are, baby," she says, and gives him a fast grin before she goes to grab her pack. "C'mon, let's blow this popsicle stand."

The market square is just starting to pick up as they make their way out of the city, him and Whisper falling into the rest of the crowd of drifters and residents moving through the streets as some of the slower shops are just starting to open for the day. Others have been open for hours, and Whisper gets nods and smiles from some of them, the ones she's done business with the most in her cover as a ruins-rover. There's even a friendly-ish wave from Myrna, and Whisper makes sure to smile back extra-wide at her, her gaze never flickering to the sweet-faced girl stocking gadgets on the back shelves.

(Deacon's particularly proud of that one.)

When they keep going past the turnoff toward the back street, however, Deacon veers close enough to bump his shoulder against hers. "No goodbyes for the good detective?"

She flicks her gaze sideways, to where the Valentine Detective Agency sign is glowing faintly at the end of the alley: not as vivid as it is after dark, but still bright against the shadowed walkway. "We pretty much said it all last night. If he needs something else, he knows where to send a letter."

_And where's that, exactly,_ Deacon thinks, but he's got a good feeling that he knows already. He wishes he'd known just how many ties she still had to Goodneighbor and its mayor before now. Not because it matters, particularly, though he can think of a couple ways to take advantage of that, at some point down the line. Just because he'd like to know.

"Guess it means I get you all to myself," he says, angling for a smile and getting one. She bumps her shoulder back against his.

"So no different from usual, then."

_April,_ he thinks, and doesn't say anything back.

They're quiet the rest of the way out of the city. Danny's not on shift this morning, and while the on-duty guard clearly recognizes her, they merely exchange friendly nods as she and Deacon duck under the creakily half-opened gate. There's a low haze of fog over the road outside, rapidly burning away by the rising midsummer sun, and without a word, Whisper pulls off the sunglasses still perched on the top of her head and passes them over.

He slides them on. They fit perfectly, of course. "Aww, partner. You shouldn't have."

She snorts and scrubs a hand through her hair, disordering the tidy waves into something a little closer to her usual messy curls. There's too much grease in it still to look truly natural, but it's close. "Figured you'd want to get back to normal as much as I did, by this point." She scritches her fingers against an itchy spot at the back of her neck. "Ugh. I'm going to need a shower when we get back to HQ. I like being under cover as much as the next guy, but a week's on the long side for me."

"Yeah," Deacon says, and thinks of the days they spent in each other's company, never more than an arm's length apart. The flirtation, and the sweetness, the absent kisses and the pet names and the _openness_ of it all. The worst problem with lying, Deacon's come to realize over the years, is that eventually there comes a point when you can't even tell you're not being honest. "It'll be good to get back to normal.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First of all: not the final update.
> 
> I looked at the word count on this extremely-not-finished chapter, and thought: _this is getting ridiculous._ So I split it up into mini-arcs, which means that you have a shorter chapter here and another shorter chapter coming when I'm done with edits and then the final chapter coming when.... I finish it? Someday? This story got really out of hand, y'all. This was supposed to be another 20k of sex and some feelings and now there's, like, a plot? I object.
> 
> Thanks you guys for bearing with me. For anyone who's been reading this on tumblr, there's not a _huge_ amount of changes between the draft and this one. For anyone who's waiting till it posts here, enjoy!

In August, Whisper takes a vacation.

Well, "vacation" is probably a generous word for it, really, but it’s a lot more of a break than she’s allowed herself to have since they started this gig, so Deacon’s going to take credit nonetheless. Even that took a not-insignificant amount of cajoling, and a really compelling secondary objective: an open call for aid on Radio Freedom (a name that Deacon will literally never stop making jokes about), about a pack of super mutants pressuring in on the main route to the Castle. It’s not the first call they’ve picked up while they’re working and probably far from the last, but this time they’re in between jobs and the situation is urgent enough that it makes a good excuse for Deacon to shove her off with a smile and a wave telling her that they'll somehow manage to survive without her for a couple of weeks. No sooner are the words out of his mouth then he starts a mental countdown of how many seconds it’ll take her to argue that she doesn’t need to take the extra time.

"It won't take two weeks to-"

_Like clockwork,_ he marvels, hiding a smile. In some things, she’s as predictable as the sunrise. "Take a goddamn break, Whisper."

She scowls at him. "You know, coming from you-"

"Hypocritical, I know," he says, and gives her a sunny grin in return. The trick to a good lie, he’s found, especially when you’re lying to someone who knows your tells, is to make sure that you’re not actually lying at all. "Look, something like this ain't exactly good for Railroad business, either, considering how much intel we've got going through the trade routes."

A quirk of her eyebrow. She's got that twitch to the corner of her mouth that means she's trying to seem mad but can't quite get there, and Deacon loves getting that out of her. It always makes him feel like he's won something. "And how central the Castle is to those trade routes."

He clicks his tongue and points at her. "Exactly. Your pal Garvey is no slouch, gotta give him credit. And considering that we've still got an unknown Institute base somewhere along the coast…"

"...we can't exactly afford to let the trade routes go down," Whisper finishes, narrowing her eyes. "Hmm. Okay. Now how much of that is your actual reasoning, and how much of that is spin?"

He widens his eyes in mock offense and presses his hand to his chest. _Don’t oversell it, don’t oversell it…_ "I think I'm wounded at that implication, partner."

"So most of it," she concludes, but she doesn't seem annoyed. "It's cool, I can take a hint. If you need me out of town for a bit I'll get gone. Just promise to fill me in at some point, yeah?"

Sometimes he loves how quick she is on the draw, how good she's gotten at seeing through his bullshit. Sometimes he worries that she's gotten a little _too_ good at it. "Makin' no promises, here. Operational security, blah blah blah."

"Yeah, but you're supposed to be training me," she points out slyly. "Just think of how much valuable information I'm missing out on."

He rolls his eyes. "Maybe next time I'll work on teaching you _subtlety,_ " he says, and she laughs and shoves at his shoulder.

"I think I've proven I can be plenty subtle," she says, with a grin so filthy he's pretty much guaranteed to think about that time in Goodneighbor a couple months ago, when they'd been playing a pair of drifters up from the Capital, and she'd murmured in his ear "Think you can keep quiet?" before they slid into the booth. And she'd spent the next hour entertaining a table full of mercs with a round of increasingly improbable combat stories, all the while fondling him slowly and expertly under the table as he turned increasingly red and nonverbal. They barely made it back to the hotel room after, and as best as he's ever been able to figure, none of their new friends ever suspected a thing.

He flushes at the memory and scowls at her a little, mostly for show. "I can see that you've mastered _distraction_ techniques just fine."

She laughs and presses a kiss to the corner of his mouth. He blinks, surprised, but she pulls away again before he can react, grabbing her jacket and shrugging into it. "I'm going, I'm going. Hey, you cleared this with Dez, right? I'm not gonna get shit for skipping out on the thing in Bunker Hill?"

Desdemona is slowly coming around to the idea that the Minutemen might actually be useful to them, if properly implemented, and Whisper is the obvious point of connection to use if they want to keep the Railroad out of it. Deacon hadn't even had to remind her that she _wanted_ Whisper to take a vacation from Railroad business for a while; it was obvious that she'd considered it in her weary sigh, the worried look she'd given to the corner where Whisper was explaining to Glory that _no,_ cavemen didn't get weapons either, and _no_ , traps did not count as weapons. Whisper was obliging enough to have a bruise the size of Manhattan on her cheekbone from where she'd taken an elbow from one of the raiders trying to pressure in toward Ticonderoga a couple days before, and she looked particularly small next to Fixer, who was wolfing down a bowl of noodles and egging Glory on. Dez didn't even hesitate before she authorized the downtime.

Deacon likes knowing what people are afraid of. It always makes it so much easier to get what he wants without too many questions.

"Fearless leader is fine with it," Deacon says, and hands her her pack. "Seriously, get out of here. If you wait too much longer you're going to miss all the fireworks."

She grins, bright and sunny. "Oh baby, you of all people know that the fireworks don't start till I arrive."

"Egoist," he says fondly.

"It's not bragging if it's true," she says, and shrugs her pack up onto her shoulders. She doesn’t quite look at him when she adds, "Don't get into too much trouble while I'm gone. You know how I feel about you having fun without me."

“Not much chance of that, partner,” he says. He can’t keep himself from wondering if she’s good enough to hear the falsehood in his voice, or if she’s just hearing how strange it feels to be saying goodbye to her at all. "I'm just going to be languishing here, pining for the day I next see your shining face."

She tilts her head. "Not even a little bit of trouble?"

"Well, maybe a little," he says, and reaches for her. He wants to hug her goodbye- wants even more to grab her and put her against the wall, kiss her till she’s panting and clinging to his shoulders. To give her something good to remember him by. He's already itching at the idea that he'll wake up tomorrow and reach for her and she won't be there.

Worse to have to wonder if she’ll come back at all.

_Don’t worry about things you can’t change,_ he reminds himself, and that thought firms his resolve, lets him ghost his hand up her arm and tousle her hair before dropping his hand safely back to his side. “Take care of yourself out there.”

It’s like a shorthand, for all of the things he can’t actually say, and the particularly sweet smile she gives him in return says that maybe she can hear some of it. "See you on the flip side, partner," she says, almost too casually, and then turns with a jaunty wave and is gone.

Deacon waits about half an hour, plenty of time for the coast to clear, and then grabs his stuff and follows her out, locking up the bolthole behind him and heading back to HQ. He times it just right to arrive around two in the morning, when PAM is in her downcycle for the night and he's able to use the terminal uninterrupted. He puts in the expected report on the Ticon op, then puts in the password Desdemona probably still thinks he doesn't know and opens up the file on Kellogg.

Two weeks, he figures. If he hasn't gotten word from Amari by the time he sees Whisper again, he'll just take the brainbox back out of her pack and make the handover himself, but two weeks isn't too long to wait. Tinker's got plenty of shit to go gaga over with the bits Deacon already handed over, and besides- the bastard's been dead for quite a while. Most of what they could pull out of that chip would be old intel, anyway. Useful, but not urgent. Two weeks isn't much to delay, and Whisper deserves a chance to get the answers herself, if she wants them. She's earned that much.

Even if it means that she doesn’t come back, when she’s done.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

By day three, Deacon's already cursing his decision. He could've gone with her, after all. She made it pretty clear, when she brought it up, that she was expecting him to be joining her. She surprised enough at his refusal that she let it show, for a moment, before smoothing her disappointment back into her usual good cheer, and _any other time_ that would’ve been enough to change his mind, right there. It’s not the mission itself would’ve taken much of a bite out of their schedules, honestly. Knowing Whisper and her habit of ruthless competence, they'll probably be done with the super mutants in a day or two. Then everyone'll be piling back to headquarters to make a party out of it. Whisper might not be their general anymore, but most of the soldiers assigned to the Castle were recruited under her, and any time she's visiting is excuse enough for some kind of celebration.

Hell, the last time they went there, when they ditched out on Fixer and Doc in June, everyone was so happy to see her that pretty much the whole place called off work for the day. No one even questioned the scruffy merc tagging along, though he did hear a couple of jokes about "the Captain's latest stray." Some of the recruits took them diving for shellfish in the shallows, which- large bodies of water: nice to look at, less nice to visit up close, and that's not counting the dose of Rad-X they all had to take. On the other hand, Whisper was wearing nothing but a pair of soaked-through white long johns and it had been two weeks, so Deacon was distinctly disinclined to complain.

The farmhands pulled some of the tatos and the early corn from the fields, and all of it went into a big pot simmering over an open fire in the courtyard that eventually turned into some of the best stew he'd had in his life. He spent most of the afternoon pleasantly buzzed on cheap homebrewed beer and debating crop rotation with one of the farmhands, killing time until Whisper came back from wherever Garvey dragged her off to consult. She pulled him away with the barest of excuses to his smirking drinking buddy, murmuring into his ear that she'd promised him a view.

So he followed her up one of the watchtowers with her pack stuffed full of more of the homebrew and they set up facing the ocean, watching the way the sunset behind them reflected over the waves, and getting drunk on her (almost certainly stolen) stash. She was the one who started throwing their empties out towards the ocean and taking potshots at them, but he was the one who started the bets. That kept them entertained for a while until they started getting drunk enough that playing with firearms was a bad idea. After that the wagers kept up even if their aim wasn't on the table anymore, so they started betting on everything else: a truth, a dare, a kiss, an article of clothing. Until they were naked out there on the battlement where any passing guard could see, him flat on his back on the wind-chilled stone with her rising over him in the moonlight. 

"I know we were supposed to be working on your leadership skills," she told him, her voice low and hoarse and she lined them up. "But I'm thinking that maybe that's a lesson that could be delayed for a while."

"You'll get no- awww, _fuck_ \- argument from me," he said, panting as she slowly impaled herself on him. He steadied her with a hand on her waist, clutching down hard as she worked herself open on him. Jesus Christ, she was so fucking tight, taking him on eagerness and determination and not much else in the way of foreplay, and all he could do was hang on and let her. "I always welcome _nnnn_ examples from the professor."

"And you're just clever enough to learn by observation," she murmured, bottoming out and rocking back and forth experimentally. He slid his hand higher, up to the nape of her neck, pressing gently until she let herself fall forward and brace herself on his chest. Her eyes were almost black in the moonlight. "If you can keep up with me, that is."

And _that_ teasing was nothing but deliberate, so he tightened his grip on the back of her neck, almost punishingly hard. Like she was going to try to get away. "I think I can handle it, sweetheart."

She rocked back into his grip and then down again, her palms flat on his chest. "Full marks for participation," she whispered, and pressed down harder, just enough to make it a bit of a struggle to breathe around her weight. He felt it like a live wire down his spine, his fingers tightening into claws at her neck and her hip, and she gave him a smile like the one she aimed down the barrel of a gun, pressing, pressing, pressing. "Gold star for you-"

The distinctly unappetizing sound of someone emptying a chamber pot into the gutter interrupts Deacon's pleasant trip down memory lane, and he straightens away from the wall where he's waiting for his contact, rolling his eyes at himself. Being surrounded by a bunch of over-armed, over-eager wannabe soldiers isn't exactly his idea of a good time, but anything's gotta be better than Goodneighbor in the summer, enjoying the smell of garbage left out too long in the heat and wondering what she’s doing right now, if she’s found the implant, if she’s angry at him for interfering-

_You’ve got work to do,_ he reminds himself. If she _hasn’t_ found it yet, then he figures he’s only got a couple of days before Whisper gets bored of her pet soldiers and goes looking for trouble- probably ignoring the rest of her vacation, if he knows her at all. And if she does find the brainbox and she’s willing to take what he’s offering, then she’ll be coming straight for Goodneighbor. Either way, he’s got to work fast. He’s on the clock.

He wraps up in Goodneighbor as quickly as possible, moves on from there to Diamond City, playing a self-important trader that couldn't be more different than the quiet merc who followed Olivia. (If she _does_ take the time, and she _doesn’t_ want to use the implant, it’s about even odds whether she’ll go to Hancock or Valentine first. Deacon likes to cover every angle.) From there he makes his way to Bunker Hill, doing the security sweep Dez wanted. Multitasking is, after all, a specialty of his.

Everywhere he goes, he tags in everyone he can reach, and leaves messages for the ones he can't. Word starts going out to their runners and scouts on the settlements and caravans: they're looking for old intel. Gen 2 sightings, infiltration rumors, kidnapping reports- anything new that they can get their hands on, now that a couple years have passed and people are a little more willing to open their mouths.

And especially anything involving a child.

It's been bugging him, ever since Whisper told him that Kellogg took her kid. Not just that it happened to her, though he feels for her, of course he fucking does. She's his _partner._ But the thing that's really been bothering him is the idea of the Institute getting involved in a child kidnapping. He's always known that Whisper didn't grow up on stories of Institute crimes like the rest of them, and while she's always been pretty damn quick on the uptake, she obviously didn't have the context to realize how strange it was. He's been in this game over twenty years now, and he's never heard of that happening before. Not substantiated, anyway, and Whisper might lie about a lot of things, but he’s pretty damn sure she wasn’t lying about that. What would the Institute even want with a kid? There'd be no point in replacing them with a synth, not when you could just snatch the parent instead.

And why in the name of God would they authorize Kellogg, of all people, to oversee the op? Kellogg wasn't the sort that you sent out to retrieve someone, not if you wanted them brought to you in one piece. Deacon's heard that back in the day he used to be more restrained, but that kid he had with him in Diamond City last year was, what, ten? Whisper told him that was probably her son ( _fuck,_ that was her son and they'd known he was there and they'd done nothing and-) so it couldn't have been more than a decade ago. Kellogg's leash was a lot looser, by then.

And if they _did_ start sending out their favorite mad dog to snatch kids, then was it an isolated incident? Or part of a pattern? He doesn't have enough intel outside of the Commonwealth to know, and that worries the hell out of him. If her kid _wasn't_ the only one to get snatched, then that means that Institute has been venturing out past their usual stomping grounds, and that's the kind of thing he needs to know, _yesterday._ And if it _was_ an isolated case, then what what the hell was so important about Whisper's kid? And why would they take the child, kill her husband, and leave her alive with the knowledge of who'd done it? If there's one thing you could count on with Kellogg, it was that the man liked to keep his ops clean, the kind of clean that meant nobody left behind to serve as a witness. If she was left alive, it was probably for a reason.

And that's a reason he probably needs to know. For her, if he can. But for the rest of them, too.

So he investigates. He digs deep into his private bribery stash and spreads caps around like water. He uses a couple of more reliable intermediaries to put out a story that the Gunners have been taking kids for training, lets his runners know to comb through the storm of rumors that'll be sure to follow for anything old enough to be genuine. He sends messages out to any city, settlement, or tribal camp within a two-week journey, putting a premium on any intel about child disappearances. And he tries not to feel like fucking scum for using Whisper's loss like this, like it was just so much grist for the intelligence mill. Like it didn't mean anything that she'd trust him enough to share that with him.

But he has to know. He _has_ to. Three years of his _life_ spent tracking every scrap of old intel, every half-forgotten Institute _rumor_ he could get his hands on, and all it ever brought him was a bunk halfway across the Commonwealth while the Switchboard was getting wiped out. If there's a chance that Whisper's tragedy could give him what he needs, give him a single mistake he could leverage, then he has to take it. He can't let a chance like this slip through his fingers.

But there's no reason she has to be here for it, either. Especially not where he's about to go.

It's not until day nine that he gets the message he's hoping for, delivered by a runner when he's on his way out of Bunker Hill. "You got a geiger counter on ya, bub?" the woman says, her eyes intense, and Deacon sighs. He last saw just a few days ago, when he left Goodneighbor. He's pretty sure even the Institute can't replace someone that quick. A healthy dose of paranoia is usually a good way to survive in this business, but there's paranoia and then there's _batshit crazy._

Ah, well. Perils of the business. "Yeah, yeah, mine's in the shop," he says. "You handle the run from Churchill, right?" She stares down at him. "I believe a compatriot of mine was expecting a delivery."

The woman looks both ways, her eyes darting fast enough that it looks more like jet jitters than casing the joint. Then she steps closer, ducks her head down till her face is right above his. Deacon stands his ground and raises an eyebrow.

"Churchill says, 'Thanks for the shipment. Whiskey's always a big hit in an election year.'"

So Whisper's back from the Castle, and was last seen having drinks with Hancock down at the Rail; no visible injuries or signs of other distress. Which means that she made it back more or less in one piece, but doesn't tell him if she's found the brainbox yet, or if she's gone to see Amari. It’s just as well; knowing that isn’t enough to know how she feels about it, or where they stand. He won’t know that until she tells him. (If she’s still there to-) That will have to wait.

"Thanks," he tells her. "Anything else?"

She blinks and leans back again. "He also says 'Send more if you can. Look's like the party's just getting started."

Hmm. So Whisper's staying in the State House for now, instead of heading back to HQ to cut her break short. He doesn't know if that's a good or bad sign. Avoiding him, or taking advantage of her vacation? Fuck, he can't worry about it. He can't let himself think about what she's going to do, or how she's going to react to his meddling. He'll just have to wait and see.

"Thanks," he says, and flips her a bag with a few caps in it. "For the trip. Tell Churchill I said that we're out of stock for now, but I'll see what I can put together when I get back into town."

He leaves her to take care of whatever business she has and heads out of the city, popping a stealth boy as he soon as he can break line of sight to stay clear of any overly-curious onlookers. His cover works the trade route between Bunker Hill and Diamond City, and Deacon's not interested in answering questions about why he's taking the road out of Boston. Not even from his own people.

Fort Hagen's about a day's hike west. Deacon slings his rifle into his arms and sets off whistling.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

He gets back into the city only a couple days before the end of the second week, slipping down the back entrance in the wee hours of the morning only to be greeted by Carrington's scowling face. "Got stuck on night watch, huh?" he says sympathetically, and almost laughs at the unfriendly look he gets in return. "It happens to the best of us."

"Fixer is due to return from a mission within the hour," Carrington says stiffly. "I took this shift so that I could be prepared if he needs medical treatment."

_Sometimes you make it so easy to hate you,_ Deacon thinks. _And sometimes you make it really goddamn difficult._ "Good show, Doc," he says, with just enough of an edge in his voice to make it hard to tell whether he's being sarcastic or sincere. "Lookin' out for the little guy."

Carrington narrows his eyes, unimpressed as always with his games. "You know, with Whisper on temporary leave, I was under the impression that you would be making an effort to attend to your responsibilities here at headquarters."

"Why would you think a thing like that?" Deacon asks, honestly baffled. "Hey, speaking of which, is she back yet?"

Carrington purses his lips. "You're the 'intelligence agent.'" He looks like good breeding and sheer force of will are the only thing keeping him from putting air quotes around the last two words. "Why ask me?"

"I'll take that as a 'no,'" Deacon decides, and dumps a bag of stimpaks onto the table next to him. "Here, I got you presents. Courtesy of Stockton."

He grins at the look of shock that nets him and walks off humming- quietly, in deference to the hour- to find himself an unoccupied corner so he can write up his report for Dez. Editing merrily as he goes, of course: she doesn't need to hear about him running down old leads, and he doesn't want to deal with the fallout if she does. Not just because she hasn’t always been the most enthusiastic about that kind of project in the past (...to say the least…), but also because he doesn't want to have to answer any questions about the thing that put him back on the hunt. Not that he'd tell her the _truth,_ obviously, but Deacon's best lies are the ones he never actually has to tell.

_Oh, that's a good line,_ he thinks, and makes a mental note. He and Whisper are long past the point where he needs to make that kind of object lesson, but he's definitely going to break that one out on the next puppy that Dez throws his way for a bit of orientation. Whisper, at least, would appreciate his wit.

Jokes to Carrington aside, he does take a day to catch up on the reports that came into HQ in his absence: all quiet on the western front, and the northern, and southern. From the east he gets a bit of good news, for a certain value of 'good': scouts have spotted Gen 2s near Warwick homestead. Not just miscellaneous patrols, but persistent and often enough that his runner in the area is pretty sure that they're coming from Spectacle Island.

Which means the good news is that they've finally located the new Institute base on the coast. And the bad news is that there's definitely a new Institute base on the coast, and it's not just an observatory station. Spectacle Island is big enough that they could build up a respectable outpost with nobody the wiser, and while it's almost impossible to track Institute movements, best estimates put them with a couple dozen Gen 2 guards and at least two full work crews of Gen 3s. They're getting settled in.

Spectacle Island is almost smack-dab across the water from the Castle, which sends a pretty clear message about who they're eyeing as their next target. Good news for the Railroad, if it means that their attention is going elsewhere for a time. Bad news for the Railroad, in that the trade boom in the wake of the Minutemen expansion is keeping their intel flowing. Bad news for everybody, if the Institute manages to take out one of the only surviving power structures in the Commonwealth, _again._

There's not much he can do about it now, though, so he plugs the information into the system for PAM's routing calculations and sends out standby orders to his people in the southeast. He's pretty sure that the Institute isn't planning on moving anytime soon, or they would have already hit. Deacon will play the watch-and-wait game for a while, get the lay of the land and see if he can't find a weakness that they can exploit. And then, when he sees Whisper again, he'll have her send the warning to General Garvey. She's got channels the Institute won't know about, and Preston's more likely to listen if it comes from her. They'll be prepared- as prepared as you can ever be, once the Big Bad Wolf starts thinking about blowing your little house down.

At least now they know where the Institute patrols were coming from. They can route their people around it, get back some of the breathing room that they lost in July. It _is_ good news, it's just- tiring. There's always something else.

_Strike down one head, and two more shall grow,_ he thinks, and rubs his hands over his face. The rasping noise that greets him reminds him that he desperately needs to get a shave at some point soon. Or... not. Whisper tends to like it when he forgets to shave. Likes the burn of stubble on her jaw, her throat, her belly. The inside of her thighs...

Whoops, let his mind wander a little too far there. He tries to focus back on his work, but the pooling of warmth between his legs tells him he's a little late on the draw. _Jesus Christ, man, you can't get hard in the middle of HQ,_ he thinks, a little appalled at himself, but it takes more effort than he likes to pull away from the fantasy his tired mind has oh-so-helpfully offered up. Unlike the last time he had to go without, he had all the space and privacy in the world to work out the frustration, but it turns out sleeping alone was worse. Especially sleeping alone in the dead, empty ruins of Fort Hagen, with nothing and no one to think about but the traces of the carnage still left around him, the bodies of synths too broken for the Institute to reclaim, the scorch marks and bullet holes on the walls from where Whisper fought for her life. For her son's life.

And failed.

The atmosphere didn't exactly set the mood, is what he's saying. He had a few other things on his mind. Back in safe (safer) territory, he's starting to feel the itch again, reminding him that it's been a couple of weeks. To be fair, it’s a welcome change to where his head's been at recently. Still. It'd be nice if his libido didn't decide to come back online right in the middle of his very nosy coworkers. Pretty much anyplace would be better, honestly, given how much these assholes like to gossip about him _already,_ but someplace with his partner would be best of all.

(She can’t be _that_ mad at him. Right?)

He does some quick calculations about his remaining workload and drums his fingers on the desk. He's more or less gotten caught up on all his reports here, and he usually spends most of his time in the field anyway. He hasn't gotten the word that she's left Goodneighbor, and while she's good enough to slip the leash without much effort, he's willing to bet she's still there. Sure, he was just there last week, but it never hurts to visit one of the biggest hotbeds of gossip in the Commonwealth. He could always go down there, pick out a cover Hancock won't find suspicious, go say hello. Maybe find out if she's been to see Amari yet. More importantly, find out if she's mad at him for poking his nose where it doesn't belong. See if she might be willing to-

"Ay, Deacon!" someone yells, and he looks up from his desk to see Drummer Boy hanging around the corner. "Dez said she wanted you, something about an op with Glory."

_I_ wonder if dear leader is psychic, Deacon thinks, and gives Drums a thumbs-up. "Be right there," he says, and sighs. So much for that idea. He'll just have to wait until she comes back on her own.

And she will come back. No matter how pissed she may or may not be at him, he's sure of that much, at least. On the surface she's just as delightfully conniving and deceitful as any man could want from a fellow intelligence agent, but when it comes down to it, she's rock-solid right down to the bone.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The op with Glory is- well, it goes about as well as any op with him and Glory ever does, and better than most. There's a reason the two of them aren't often assigned to work together, and it's not just for efficient management of resources. Deacon will doesn't have a lot of patience for "shoot first, ask questions later" as a lifestyle choice, and Glory's pretty much made that her motto. He doesn't resent her for it- she gets the job done and then some, and they couldn't ask for a more dedicated agent- but he doesn't much like working with her, either. That's fine, he doesn't have to jive with every agent and they wouldn't be very effective as an organization if he _did,_ but still. Not his idea of a good time.

The last couple times they worked an op together it was under Whisper's orders, and that suited both of them just fine. Whisper's got a natural knack for command, and while Glory doesn't generally like to follow anyone's lead, she's apparently willing to make an exception when it comes to the rare individual who's just as deadly as she is. And both of them are professional enough (if just barely) that they're not going to bicker when they're following someone else's lead.

This time around, though, there's no Whisper. There's just him and Glory and something near the Mass Pike tunnel exit that's turned this route a black fucking hole for traders and their people alike. It's the kind of thing that Glory would usually work solo, but they're under very explicit instructions to keep things quiet, and Dez sent him along to make sure that happened. They're close enough to Diamond City patrols that drawing any extra attention to themselves is a real risk.

Glory is surprisingly patient while Deacon scopes out the area. He half-expects to get back to their little base camp and find that she's blown off orders and gone in guns blazing, but she's just waiting there, polishing the shotgun braced across her knees. She looks up with a raised eyebrow when he comes in. "What's the word, creeper?"

"Raiders," he says, and goes over to his pack, pulls out a stealth boy. That's two in one week he's used, and it's been months since he's needed one before. Usually Whisper is the one who- "They're holed up in the old hardware store. I couldn't get close enough to get a good look, but I think they heard me because I heard someone start calling for help."

Glory gives him a look. "And that made you think raiders?"

He returns it. "No, the people giving her shit for making bad bait when I didn't respond made me think raiders."

Glory tips her head in acknowledgement. "Fuckers must have been preying on passers-by for a while now. We going to move or sit on it?"

"Move," Deacon says, and slings his rifle over his shoulder. "I've got someplace to be."

Their plan- if you can call something so cribbed-together a 'plan' in the first place- is pretty simple: Glory's going to come up on the front like her namesake, and Deacon's going to come in through the back door and help take out the trash. Simple but effective, at least; no one ever sees him coming, and Glory gets to do what she does best. Ten minutes after they move into position, Glory's whistling the all-clear and Deacon's prowling around trying to find their stash.

"Where are you?" Glory calls back from the front, and Deacon sticks his head out into the aisle so she can find him. "We're good, right?"

"All clear back here, too," he says. "I think I found a trap door down here, you mind giving me a hand?"

For once, she doesn't make a crack about her superior strength, just shrugs and shoves her hands in her pockets. "Sure."

The trap door turns out to be secured by a pretty solid set of padlocks. He didn't find any keys when he was going over the corpses- he glances over at Glory but she shakes her head. Deacon sighs and pulls out his lock picks. He's gotten rusty at this; normally he can just make Whisper take care of it. "Gimme a minute."

"No rush," says Glory, and settles down on her heels while he starts feeling his way through the lock. "You cleaned house pretty good back there."

Deacon glances back at the pile of bodies near the back door. "There's something to be said for the quiet way, you know."

She rolls her eyes. "Yeah, yeah, I've heard it before. It ain't my style, what can I say?"

On his better days, Deacon can sympathize with that. He's seen too many synths fresh out of the box not to understand what it must be like: no words without "sir" or "ma'am" on the end, never speak unless spoken to, never show emotion, never get _noticed._ Most of the synths cope with the outside world by losing themselves, taking on new memories, a new life. Glory handled it by spitting in the face of everything that had been forced on her as loudly and as often as possible, and Deacon gets that. He does.

But on his not-so-great days, Deacon wants to shove her face into the bloody messes she leaves behind, like a puppy that won't stop shitting the carpet. _How the fuck do you think this is going to help anything,_ he wants to tell her. _Shit like this only ever gets good people killed._

This is a good day, so all he says is, "Hey, as long as it gets done."

"Yeah." She gives him a sharp look. "You know, time was, you'd've just snuck in the back and left the warm bodies to me."

Deacon grits his teeth and works the pin into the last tumbler. "I know my way around a rifle, Glorellicus."

"Yeah, I just mean-" She sighs. "You get shit done, D. That's all I mean."

That's not all she means. What someone says, that's _never_ 'all they mean.' But Deacon lets it go. She's trying to compliment him, in her rough way. It's not her fault that Deacon would prefer to talk about just about anything else aside from how good he is at killing people. "I appreciate that, Morning Glory. You wanna hug it out?"

"What? No!" Glory shoves at his shoulder, but she's laughing. "C'mon, you into that lock yet?"

Deacon arches an eyebrow and lets the silence linger, so that when the lock clicks open a moment later, it's audible to both of them. "Just about."

Inside is a pile of stripped bodies, like he more than half-suspected they'd find, and he only sighs silently as Glory hisses in an angry breath. "Sick _fucks,_ " she says, but then both of them fall silent as they start going through the graveyard, pulling their shirts up over their noses to help deal with the smell and looking for any familiar faces. Some of them are too badly decomposed to identify, but he recognizes Tiger Lily, and out of the corner of his eye he sees Glory close the eyes of a pale man with tribal scars all down his back. Deacon turns his back and leaves her to it, starts going through the boxes of stuff the raiders had lined up against the back wall.

It's bugging him a lot more than he'd like to admit, what Glory said about him. Mostly because she's right. A couple of years ago, even, and he wouldn't have duo'd up for this assignment. He'd've left it to Glory, or farmed it out on one of the heavies, and gone on his own merry way to get his stuff done. And that would have been fine, that wasn't a problem because everyone knew he wasn't a combat operative. He didn't exactly get a lot of practice killing people.

But today he didn't even think about it- just sent Glory to the front and took the back door, because that was the most efficient route and he wanted to get the assignment done. He hadn't really thought about much when he took out the raiders at the back, either, aside from noting that they were better-armed than they had any right to be, enough that they'd probably been at this gig for a while. And then he'd shot them, and then the ones after that, and the ones after that, and then he'd checked the bodies and moved on. Thoughtless.

_You've changed, boyo,_ he tells himself. Maybe for the better, maybe for the worse. He can't figure out how to feel about it. It's not like he feels bad that the fucks are dead, or even particularly that he should feel bad for having been the one to kill them, just- When did that happen? _Why_ did that happen? Deacon's swapped his face so many times he can't even keep track, but some things don't change. Twenty years in this business, and he figured he'd pretty much been set in stone.

He knows what's different. He knows what changed, over the last year. He just doesn't want to admit it.

He and Glory get back up to the main level when the smell gets to be too much for them, and then make for the back door and stand out in the alley, breathing deeply of the burnt, irradiated air. Rad storm coming in, probably still a couple hours out. They've got time to get back to base.

"We should set this place on fire," Glory says abruptly.

"No," Deacon says, but when she opens her mouth to argue, he says, "We should let our runners pick through the gear in there. No need for it to go to waste."

She sighs. "Yeah. Probably."

What the hell. "And _then_ we should set it on fire," he adds, and Glory grins at him, her dark eyes shining in the lamplight.

"You're not so fuckin' bad, D," she says, and claps him on the shoulder. "C'mon. Let's get moving. If we get lucky, we can get back before the storm hits."

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The whole way back to HQ, Deacon formulates a series of really good excuses to slip off to Goodneighbor, depending on what kind of mood Dez might be in and what will play best. He’s willfully ignoring the possibility that Whisper might not want to see him, and is instead keeping himself occupied by going through a baker's dozen of different covers in Goodneighbor that he's been itching to try with a partner, or- ooh! He could leave her a message and see how long it took her to find him, that could be fun. Or he could try his hand at breaking into the State House, it's been a while since he's pulled that off-

He's so distracted, in fact, that it takes him a full thirty seconds to realize that she's already at HQ.

"Hey, partner!" Whisper calls out, from where she's lounging against a stone column next to Dez, and Deacon forces himself to start moving before his moment's hesitation gets too obvious. "You're just in time."

That cue's so obvious a blind man would see it, so Deacon starts moseying his way over, hands tucked into his pockets. "In time for what?"

The brief, blinding flash of her grin says _trouble,_ but her mouth says, "Combat mission," as appropriately serious as Dez could want. He side-eyes her, subtle enough that no one can see it through his shades, but she just bounces on her toes a little. Eager, cheerful, no hint of rancor on her face or body. Well, she wouldn’t show it in front of everyone else, would she?

"A pack of super-mutants have moved into one of the old high rises near, well, High Rise," Dez tells them both. “So far their raiding parties have only penetrated into nearby Gunner territory-”

“Convenient for us,” Whisper puts in. Dez gives her a reproving look.

“For the time being, perhaps, but the conflict between the two groups doesn’t overmuch heighten the safety of the route, and if the super mutants wipe out the raiders, they’ll be hunting near Ticonderoga next.”

“And if the Gunners win, they’ll be looking to build back up after their losses,” Whisper says. “Fair enough.”

Deacon can’t help the sideways look he sends her way- it’s not like Whisper not to have considered all of those angles. It rings hollow, given that she made her name in the Commonwealth by taking back pieces of it inch by bloody inch at the head of the Minutemen. It rings _especially_ hollow given that she just came back from carving out a super mutant nest near the Castle. She’s playing games, though Deacon’s not really sure what the end goal is here. Not that he much cares. He fully supports people taking the piss out of fearless leader, whatever their motivation.

Whisper returns his speaking look with interest, and leans her shoulder a little heavier against his. Deacon swallows his sigh of relief and lets himself relax back against the pillar. That answers that question, at least. Whatever else is going on in her head, at least she’s still his partner. If she wants to keep separate bedrolls, that he can live with. But she’s not leaving.

That’s the most important thing.

“I’m glad you understand,” Desdemona says, apparently oblivious to the byplay. “I’m sorry to send you out so soon after coming back-” and she includes Deacon in her nod, “-but due to the proximity to the raiders, this needs to be done quietly if we want to avoid a bloodbath.”

“I’m your girl,” Whisper says. “And hey, what better way to get back into the swing of things than taking out a pack of super mutants single-handedly?” Deacon clears his throat gently, and she grins at him. “With my faithful sidekick, of course.”

Deacon considers taking offense, but before he gets a chance, Desdemona says, “Just so,” hiding a smile very badly. Whisper’s good cheer is apparently infectious. “You can get the rest of the mission briefing from Drummer Boy, and I believe Tom has something for you.”

“Sure thing, boss,” Whisper says, and tips her a grin before straightening up and wandering off. Deacon exchanges a look with Dez.

“The time off seems to have been good for her,” Desdemona says, cautiously.

Deacon’s not so sure- but then, there’s stuff going on that Dez doesn’t know about. Deacon hasn’t gotten any reports of her going into the Memory Den the entire time she was in Goodneighbor, but she’s damn good at slipping a tail. And the problem with working with someone who can lie almost as well as he can? It means he can’t read her at all. He has no idea if her good mood is real or just a front for something else, and even less idea what the hypothetical ‘something else’ might be. It all depends on whether or not she used Kellogg’s implant or not. And if so, what she might have found in there.

“Yeah, she seems a lot better,” Deacon says easily. “Guess you were right after all.”

“It does happen occasionally,” Dez says, arching an eyebrow. “I’m just glad it worked out this time.”

Deacon looks over at Whisper, laughing and joking with Drummer Boy, her hands in her pockets and the slope of her shoulders almost obscured by her heavy leather jacket. He has no idea what’s going through her head. He doesn’t even know if he did the right thing, by giving it to her. Maybe he just made things worse.

“Yeah,” he says. “Me too.”

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

If there _is_ something wrong, Whisper doesn’t show it when they’re on the road, either, falling into step with him as naturally as ever, bumping his shoulder companionably with her as they walk. He eyes her sideways, letting his sunglasses cover his appraisal, but her body is loose and relaxed, her rifle easy in her hands, her eyes calm and alert as she scans the horizon for threats. She’s quiet, but that’s to be expected, going into hostile territory.

By the time they get to their destination, Deacon still doesn’t have any better idea of where they stand. Doesn’t matter right now, anyway. Whisper communicates their plan in a few short gestures, but they’ve run this play a dozen times if they’ve done it once, and Deacon could do this op in his sleep. He nods his agreement, and she grins before moving around to the side door to set up her shot. Deacon waits for her signal, then whistles low and loud, takes out the door guard when he notices and then stands there, making a tempting target for the rest of the mutants who lumber out from the back rooms, intent on avenging their fallen comrade. He stands there long enough to lure them out into the main lobby, and only when the last of them has wandered into Whisper’s kill zone does he drop to his knees and start firing.

After the first floor is clear, Whisper ambles around, taking a cursory look over the corpses to see if they have anything of value. They don’t- muties aren’t big on pockets- and then she slings her rifle over her shoulder and joins him at the bottom of the staircase, her lips curled up in a small, self-satisfied grin that Deacon knows better than anything.

“Good rabbit,” she says, and pats him on the shoulder. “Ready for the fun part?”

He tilts his head back and looks up through the ruined ceiling of the atrium. From the outside, the tower looked to be at least seven stories, and not exactly in the best of repair. It’s going to be a windy trip up.

“Sure,” he says. “The fun part.”

Whisper laughs and hooks an arm around his neck, drags him in and presses a kiss to the hinge of his jaw. “You’ll live,” she says, and then she’s gone before he can figure out how to react, heading up and hugging the wall, her feet silent and her head cocked, alert for any sign of noise.

He presses a hand to his jaw, feels the phantom press of warmth from her mouth. Does she still-

“You better hope so, Dez’ll make you cross out my name personally and then everyone will be sad for _weeks,_ ” he mutters at her back, and hears the lilting sound of her chuckle as he falls in at her heels.

They’ll finish the mission, just like always. The rest they can work out later.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

An hour later, Whisper’s prowling around the edges of the roof, checking for traps or mines. Deacon is theoretically going through the stash chest the mutant chief left behind, but really he’s just watching her: her loose-legged, aggressive walk; the confident line of her shoulders. She can play anything, but over the months they’ve worked together Deacon’s learned that he likes her best when she’s too distracted to pull on a role. Best of all when she lets herself look just as dangerous as she actually is.

_Are we good?_ he wonders silently, and can almost hear the ghost of her derisive reply: _you and me, we’re always good._ That’s what she’d say, if he lost his mind enough to ask her directly. But it doesn’t mean it’d be the truth.

Deacon closes up the stash chest- nothing worthwhile in there except maybe a few cheap shotguns they can break down for scrap- and instead breaks into their packs to lay out the bedrolls. The sun’s just starting to slip down past the horizon, and only an idiot travels after dark unless they have to. And if they’re sleeping here they’re going to want the blankets. Even now, in the hottest part of summer, it’s going to get chilly this high up after dark. They could sleep inside, but- Deacon looks over his shoulder at the corpses just inside the doorway and shakes his head. Not exactly the kind of bed companion he’s looking for tonight.

Assuming he _gets_ a bed companion tonight.

(Kellogg’s implant was gone, when he checked the side pocket of her pack.)

Eventually Whisper gets tired of staring out over the city like some brooding comic-book antihero, and wanders over to flop down next to him on the bedroll. Her careless sprawl puts her flush against him, her hip pressing into his and one leg draped halfway over his. “Okay,” she says, picking open the knots on her bootlaces, “I know you’re not a big fan of tall places, but even you have to admit that the view up here is-”

He means to wait. Honestly, he does. He’s got a whole plan for how he’s going to ease the conversation around to Kellogg’s implant, and whether or not she used it, and he’s definitely, definitely planning to make sure that they’re good before he makes any kind of move that might be construed as a pass. It’s a delicate situation, and the last thing he wants to do is potentially fuck things up worse between them, not when he doesn’t even know if they have an issue or not.

But what actually happens is he leans over and cuts her off with a kiss, her fingers still tugging impatiently at the laces on her boots. She makes an incredibly adorable little “mmph!” of surprise before she goes still for a heart-stopping moment. He thinks about pulling back, but before he can move away she gets with the program, her hands coming up to clutch eagerly at his shoulders and her tongue hot in his mouth. He tries to keep it just to that, to let her set the pace and make the next move, but he only lasts approximately ten seconds before she starts to suck on his tongue and then he rolls them over, pins her on her back underneath of him with her thighs splayed out around his hips and her breasts rubbing against his chest. Her nipples are hard enough already that he can feel them even through their shirts, from cold or arousal he doesn’t know, but the hard little points of them drive him crazy. He wants to get his mouth of them so badly, loves sucking on them, the way it makes her clutch at the back of his head and moan, but he can’t bring himself to stop kissing her long enough to get her clothes off.

She’s obviously made of sterner stuff than he is, because she’s the one that manages to break the kiss, finally, tearing her mouth away with a harsh sigh. Or maybe she just needs some air, from the way she’s panting. The hot gust of it along his throat just winds him tighter, and he slides his hands down her sides, frames her waist with his hands, lets his thumbs rub over the juts of her hipbones.

She starts laughing, breathlessly, her lips still pressed hazily to the corner of his mouth. “Oh. Hell. Yes,” she says, punctuating her words with a trail of kisses along his jaw to his ear. She gets her mouth around his earlobe and sucks, pulling a moan out of his throat, and starts wriggling enough to get a hand down between them. “Two fucking weeks, D.”

“I’ll give you the D,” he mumbles into her neck, because it’s better than anything else he could say. Better than admitting that he sent her away knowing that she might not choose to come back, that he’s lain awake at nights wondering what she’s thinking, what she’s feeling, if they’re going to be the same again after. That he’s been worried and stressed and keyed up and so fucking hungry for her, for her familiar body under his hands, for her smart mouth and her brilliant, twisty little mind. That he’s been thinking about her even when he’s tried like hell to think about anything else.

That he’s desperate.

“You’re gonna pay for that joke later,” she tells him, but her clever fingers are quick on the buttons to his jeans, and it’s the work of a moment before she’s got a hand on him, tight little fist working on his cock like she’s trying to win a race. _Fuck it,_ he thinks, and starts yanking at her pants.

It’s fast and desperate, the way she likes it best, and Deacon just lets himself fall into the rush and the heat of it: into her bitten-off moans, and the blunt fingernails scrabbling at his back, and her teeth in his shoulder. Into the way she squeezes tight around him when she comes. Into the crazy grin on her face, and the way she lets her head drop back and pants, “C’mon, Deacon, fuckin’ give it to me-”

Afterwards, they sprawl out on the roof as naked as the day they were born, Deacon with his head in her lap, passing a cigarette back and forth between them and staring up at the stars. She’s not wrong, he’s gotta admit. The view up here is _spectacular._ He forgets what it’s like, down in the city most of the time, just enough light pollution and haze to keep things blurred, but up here it’s like a painting spread out over him. You can get a view like this a few places out in the wastes, if you find an open hill on a clear night, but who’d be stupid enough to lay out in a place like that, like a midnight snack waiting to happen? Up here, though, they’re barricaded tight, with ten dead floors between them and anything else that might happen along, and for tonight they’re about as safe as they are anywhere in the Commonwealth.

“Okay,” he says, and stubs out the cigarette. “Heights do have a couple of advantages.”

“You see, this is what I’m telling you.” She’s stroking him idly, the calloused pads of her fingers gentle on his throat and jaw, her thumb rubbing at the bare curve of his skull. “You should listen to me more often. I’ve got good ideas.”

“The best,” he agrees, and affects a heavy drawl, like he’s heard on some of the merchants from the west: “Why, I don’t hardly know what to do without you, partner.”

“Oh, is that so?” She sounds amused. “And here Tom was telling me that you kept yourself busy while I was gone.”

“Vile slander,” Deacon disagrees lazily. It’s hard to get too worked up about much of anything, between the orgasm and the nicotine and the beautiful woman currently petting him like a favored cat. _A man could get used to this kind of thing._ “You know me, Whisper: I’m the very embodiment of ‘working hard, or hardly working?’”

“Yeah, that’s what I hate about you, you’re such a slacker.” And then, without any change of tone, she adds, “I went to the Memory Den.”

It’s hard to freeze when you’re already lying still, but he makes a go of it anyway as his breath stops for a moment while all of his muscles lock up. _I wish I’d put my pants back on,_ he thinks, fighting the urge to roll over and cover himself. Naked is not a good way to be having stressful personal conversations. And even worse is the loss of his shades, tossed aside somewhere around the time he lost his shirt and jumbled up somewhere in the pile of clothes off to the side. It’s been a long time since he’s had to worry about making eye contact around her, but this topic of conversation is making him wish futilely for the extra security anyway.

No choice left but to brazen it out. “Oh yeah? Is Irma still pining after Valentine, or has she moved on to easier prey?”

She makes an amused noise and runs her hand down the side of his neck. “Relax, D. I’m not angry.”

_I wasn’t worried,_ he wants to say, but some lies are too big even for him to pull off. Instead he just turns his head, presses a wordless kiss to the center of her palm. She strokes the hinge of his jaw with her thumb in acknowledgement, and then her hand drops safely back to his shoulder, the moment over.

“The implant is badly damaged, which isn’t a surprise considering how many bullets I put into Kellogg’s head. But Amari thinks she can fix it up.”

A thousand questions swirl in Deacon’s head at once, but ultimately, she’s already told him the thing that he most wanted to know. “How long?”

“A month, maybe. She says she needs some kind of specialized part. Something she can’t manufacture in-house,” she adds, before he can say anything. “It’s coming in from the Capital Wasteland on the next caravan.”

Deacon _hmm_ s. “We’ve got some people we can divert, to make sure it doesn’t get hit by raiders.”

“Probably a good idea, if you can spare them.”

There’s enough ambivalence in her voice that he tilts his head back, enough to catch a glimpse of her face. She’s not exactly smiling. “You good with this?”

She gives a weak chuckle and scrubs her free hand through her hair. “I don’t know, maybe?” She sighs. “We could really use the intel.”

That’s not why he put it into her pack and he’s pretty damn sure she knows that, but if that’s what she needs to tell herself Deacon’s not going to argue. “But?”

She shrugs and lets her hand drop back into her lap. “I figured I was done with this, you know? I thought I was going to set it aside forever.”

Deacon curls his fingers loosely against his palm to keep himself from fidgeting. Never has he wanted a pair of pants so badly in his _life,_ and that includes the time he was stuck naked in a nest of hatching mirelurks. “Would you rather I hadn’t…”

She’s silent just long enough to make him sweat before she shakes her head. “Nah. It was the right call. Just…”

He waits politely for her to finish the sentence, and when she doesn’t he offers, “Baggage?”

She snorts, seeming to ease a little. “Yeah. One word for it.”

He rolls onto his side, wraps one hand warmly around her ankle. “I’ve got bad news for you, partner. If you think that makes you special in these parts, you might want to think again.”

This one earns a genuine laugh, and she smooths a hand down his back, flicking her thumbnail absently across a rough spot where some long-ago surgeon’s knife had slipped. “Yeah? You going to tell me about yours sometime?”

Deacon rubs his cheek against her thigh and looks out over the city. This far up, everything looks empty and peaceful. Like they’re the only two people left in the world.

“Someday,” he tells her, and the worst part, the absolute _worst_ part is, he doesn’t even know if he’s lying or not.

He’s changed. He’s _still_ changing, and he doesn’t know yet what he’s going to be when it’s done. Will he still recognize himself when it’s over? Will Whisper?

Will this be the one where he can finally look himself in the eye in the mirror?

“Someday,” Whisper repeats, smiling now, and squeezes his shoulder. He leans into her grip and tries not to worry about tomorrow, when today has treated him so very well so far. “Sounds good to me."


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please also be aware that this chapter contains an explicit depiction of risky, under-negotiated, and fairly violent bdsm sex. Both parties fully consent, but with _decidedly_ insufficient negotiation beforehand. If you're concerned, please send me a message here or on tumblr and I'll be happy to provide more specific content descriptions.

Life goes on, the way life tends to do. The work doesn’t stop just because Deacon’s feeling a little unsure of his footing.

The last couple weeks of August are mostly routine, doing scouting missions along the main transport routes and shifting people around to account for the increased Institute presence in the east. Whisper goes into Goodneighbor solo for a couple days to make contact with a runner she trusts enough to send the message to the Castle. She comes back with a tip about a raider group that’s considering testing the limits of the Bunker Hill accords, and taking care of _that_ takes up the better part of a week. It’s a week out from under the prying eyes of everyone in HQ, so Deacon isn’t inclined to complain. Especially since Kessler makes sure they get a room of their own for the night before they head back to HQ. Deacon is _extremely_ disinclined to complain about that.

When they get back Drums has something for Whisper: someone left a message in the Mercer dead drop. “Caretaker says that it wasn’t one of the usual runners,” Drums tells her. “But it’s got the Minutemen seal, so Dez says it goes through you first.” He hands over the roll of paper to Whisper. “Note the intact seal.”

“Some spy you are,” Deacon chides, craning his head shamelessly to look over her shoulder. Whisper cracks the wax with a quick twist of her wrist and starts scanning the document. Drums makes a face at Deacon, which he ignores in favor of skimming the note in her hands. He doesn’t recognize the blocky handwriting, but the shorthand he knows well. It’s not Railroad code, but the old pre-war cipher used by Whisper and a handful of personal friends.

“Cait,” Whisper tells him, answering his unasked question. “It’s from Preston. Trouble up north.”

Deacon, about to make a joke, catches sight of her solemn expression and instead just arches an eyebrow. “Our kind of trouble?”

“Not sure. Possibly.” She frowns down at the letter. “It looks like a couple of the northern settlements have gone dark. No one knows if they’re still there or if they’re just refusing to make contact, but the last couple runners he sent up to find out-”

“Disappeared,” Deacon says, reading ahead. “This is up near Zimonja?”

“Other side. Northeast.”

She’s got a couple of settlements up that way, but they’re smaller, and not as connected to the trade network. Not many caravans venture up that way. The Minutemen are working on changing that, but Rome wasn’t built in a day, et cetera. And the settlements that are up there are mostly farms. Soft targets.

“You think there’s a new player up in the area?”

She rolls up the paper and shoves it into her coat pocket, her generous mouth set into a thoughtful line. “I think we need to go find out.”

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Dez isn’t what you’d call eager to approve them going off on Minutemen business; not so soon after Whisper’s last detour, but Deacon spins it as a scouting expedition and she gives in. As if there was ever any doubt.

“Also, I might have promised that we’re going to do some recruiting while we’re up there,” he warns Whisper, “so if you could try not to make a liar out of me, that would be great.”

“Yeah, ‘cause you _hate_ that.”

Deacon lounges on his bunk and watches her repack their packs with swift and practiced hands. She’s a little more inclined to travel light than he is (“All you need is a rifle and something to keep off the wet,” she’d told him, their first week in the field) but over the months she’s gotten in the habit of carrying more. Extra clothes, a wig, slick for her hair, a pot of mixed grease and ash that he mixes up to simulate road dirt. A collection of scrap and junk that can be turned to parts or props, as the need arises. A small kit of makeup, in colors that can make her look like the most well-turned lady in the stands or the most hardened prostitute in Goodneighbor, depending on how they’re applied. Chems to barter or bribe. A couple of pairs of glasses, with fake lenses and different rims. A hat.

All the same things he carries, with meds and rations distributed equally between them. He wonders when they started splitting up the supplies between their packs, with the unstated assumption that they’d be around to share. When they started divvying out the mission prep, where he’d take care of the laundry and she’d take care of the resupply, and then pack while he gave her the briefing. Was it a month ago? Three?

Longer?

“Honesty,” he agrees. “It is one of my defining traits.”

They share a smirk, and she goes back to packing. “Well, I’ll see what we can do, but anyone who lives that far out usually has a reason. And the Institute doesn’t seem to want to go up there any more than the rest of us do, so I’m not sure how much use they’d be a spotters.”

“Hope springs eternal.” He tosses her the medkit he swiped off Carrington’s desk when she finishes with the clothes, and watches her start layering in the syringes, cushioned between the layers of fabric to prevent breakage. “Seriously, though. What do you think we’re going to find up there?”

“You mean, is there any actual danger?” She sighs. “Maybe. Minutemen runners don’t usually go dark for no reason, so there’s probably something on the road that’s preying on travelers, especially lone messengers without a full patrol to back them up. But do I think that’s why the settlements went out of contact? No. I think they can read the writing on the wall about the Institute just as well as the rest of us and they got cold feet about flying the flag.”

“And a sudden lack of contact from the Castle probably didn’t help.” Deacon purses his lips. “Or support against whatever caused his runners to go dark.”

Whisper frowns down at her hands, and Deacon knows what she’s thinking, because he is too: Garvey should have sent someone up earlier. Not runner after runner, using the same methods and expecting different results, but a full patrol. Deacon’s got no doubt that they’re shorthanded right now, especially going into harvest season, and the Institute base right across the water is taking up most of their attention right now, but he’s got to see that the Minutemen are only as good as the territory they can hold. If they start letting settlements go dark without investigation, they’re going to start losing people along the edges, and then it’s only a matter of time before the Institute or some other nasty starts chewing them up from the outside in.

Whisper never would have allowed it to go this far, and they both know it. Garvey has to know it too, which is why he’s scrambling for her help now.

“Well,” Whisper says, making a visible effort to shake it off, “me going off the radar probably had something to do with it, too. Most of them never had much contact with the Minutemen, since the patrols don’t normally go that far north. I’d send a familiar face if I could, but the only others I know they’d trust are still out of contact. And Preston can’t afford to just let them withdraw without some kind of challenge, because if they set the precedent-”

“It’ll be harder for Garvey to hold the rest,” Deacon finishes. “And with the Institute pressing in…”

He trails off, and she nods, doing up the buckles on their packs. “Yeah. It’s a bad time. I mean, not that any time would be a good one, but-” She makes a frustrated gesture. “I am sorry to be dragging us out of the city like this.”

“I’m not,” he says, and waits until she looks up, startled, to catch her eye and give her a slow grin. “A week on the road? No Dez? No Carrington? No _paperwork?_ I mean. ‘Please, no. Not the _briar patch_.’”

She snorts at his deadpan tone and drops his pack onto his stomach, grinning at his protesting _oof_. “Well, when you put it that way…”

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

“So Glory is definitely Team Caveman,” Deacon tells her, on the hike up north. “Big surprise there. Drums has, after careful consideration, been stumping pretty hard for Team Astronaut, and he gets first pass on everyone coming through the door, so he’s gaining some serious traction among the runners. I’ve actually been thinking about working it into the code protocol in the next changeover, the Geiger counter thing is so played out. I mean, who even carries a Pip-boy anymore?”

She snorts and bumps his shoulder with hers, but doesn’t make the expected joke about him being blind behind his sunglasses. “What about Tinker Tom?”

“Oh, he’s out of the running entirely. Just rants about the dangers of time travel every time someone brings it up. Apparently there’s some concerns about the stability of the wormhole that brought the astronauts back in time.”

“Scandalous,” she says, and falls silent again.

She’s been like this ever since she got back from her quote-unquote vacation: a little distant, a little distracted, her head not quite in the game At first Deacon thought it maybe he was seeing things, letting his own worry cloud his perception, but the handful of times they’d actually managed to steal some time away for themselves he managed to earn her full and undivided attention, and then he was sure that nothing else had.

It’s not a problem, exactly. Whisper’s distraction is still better than most people’s laser focus, and Deacon doesn’t have any problems picking up a bit of a slack, if it goes that far. But it does leave him a little... concerned. It’d be nice to blame her pensive mood on the Minutemen troubles, but this cloud moved in well before she got that letter. And he knows exactly which direction the wind is blowing: from the south, where even now a caravan is making its way up from the Capital wastes with its valuable cargo.

_Don’t borrow trouble,_ as Carrington always likes to say. Too bad Deacon’s never been great at taking advice.

They’re still a few miles out from the settlement when they start to see signs of raiding. It’s subtle, compared to the usual raider trail signs (bodies left to rot in cages or nailed to trees, great for the appetite), but after they pass the second half-rotted dead brahmin, its packs stripped and emptied and the choice cuts of meat carved sloppily away, common sense dictates that they get the fuck off the road. Whisper knows this area better than he does, so he sends her into the lead with a nod and falls in at her heels as they slide into the treeline, soft-footed and alert with their rifles in their hands.

She takes them on a seemingly circuitous route through the woods, veering off one way or another around rocky outcroppings based on some arcane set of directions he doesn’t understand, but they’re only about half an hour later than expected when they round the corner and the squat brick homestead rises up into view. Deacon takes a deep breath, catches the mulchy-sweet smell of tarberries mixed with fresh, clean smoke of a well-kept fire. Whisper might not have been here in over a year, but it looks like she hasn’t forgotten the way. 

The second they clear the treeline, there’s a short, sharp whistle from the lookout on the roof, and Deacon watches as three of the farmers drop their tools and make a beeline for what he assumes is the communal weapons cache. Well-trained, probably drilling frequently, and on high alert. Maybe just because they’re so far out, but Deacon doubts it.

“Ho, there, travelers,” the gate guard calls. Hoarse voice, friendly enough considering the rifle in her hands. A ghoul, but he heard they all are, here. “What’s your business here?”

“Not raiding!” Whisper calls back, grinning wide enough that you can hear it in her voice. When he glances over, though, the smile doesn’t reach her eyes. She looks worried. “C’mon, Holls, you gonna let an old friend in for a drink?”

“Holy shit, if it ain’t the General herself!” The friendly hoot that she gives must be some kind of signal, because the three farmers all return their half-loaded rifles to the weapon rack and start heading back to pick up their dropped tools. The guard herself grins wide, slinging her rifle over her back and sliding down the ladder to land with a dusty thump in the gateway as he and Whisper close the gap of carefully-cleared open ground leading up to it. _Killzone, nice_. “Damned if I expected to see your pretty face around these parts, doll. What brings you by?”

“Business is business, Holly, you know how it is.” Assured that they’re not going to get shot, Whisper puts away her own rifle and closes in, letting the much taller woman wrap her up in a friendly hug. “And it’s Captain now.”

“Yeah, I heard that.” Her face says she didn’t quite believe it, but she smiles easily enough as she releases Whisper and gives Deacon an appraising look. “Who’s this, then? New partner?”

“New-ish. Still tryin’ it on for size.” Whisper’s voice is a little deeper than usual, with a bright brassy note that carries across open spaces. Her accent is pure northern farmer, with no city softness to her rough, lazy drawl. A voice the Commonwealth would trust, and one he knows for a fact she adapted from that old-timer that’s always harassing Garvey at the Castle. “You gonna let me in, or just stand out here jawin’ till the brahmin come home?”

“Hell yeah, come in. Boss man’ll want a few words.”

“Why I’m here, Holls.” Whisper tucks her thumbs in her pockets and jerks her chin at Deacon to follow. “Lead the way.”

Holly leads them on a wandering path through the main storage building, and out to the cluster of wooden buildings to the back. They’re all well-built, the boards fresh and well-cured, varnish-sealed against the winter chill and summer heat both. ‘Boss man’ runs a tight ship- but that’s not news either. Any ghoul with big enough brass ones to set up way the hell out here and keep a thriving trade route going didn’t manage it by letting things slip through the cracks.

The leader’s office turns out to the be the smaller building at the back, a single-room affair with a cluster of generators humming quietly behind it and bunches of tarberries hanging from the eaves to dry. Holly leaves them at the open door with a wink and a lazy wave, and Deacon peers over Whisper’s shoulder to see a tired-looking ghoul with pale skin and clothes that hang loose on his lean frame, tallying something up on a ledger. The Minutemen flag looms large behind him, stretched and pinned neatly across the cement wall.

_Nicely symbolic,_ Deacon thinks, and then exchanges a cynical glance with Whisper: _was that always there?_ She shakes her head with a smile. A long-term gesture of loyalty, or making a point to the visitor? Hard to tell.

Whisper knocks on the doorframe, and the ghoul looks up with an expectant look that widens into a friendly smile when he sees who’s standing there. “Captain, as I live and breathe.” He waves Whisper into the office, standing to offer his hand in unthinking, automatic courtesy. “I haven’t seen you in, oh, it’s got to be over a year now, isn’t it?”

Unstated but clear is the implication: _since before you stepped down._ Interesting that he remembered her new, correct title when Holly didn’t.

Whisper just smiles back easily and shakes his hand. “Something like that. Wiseman, this is Marty Siller. Marty, Wiseman.”

Deacon tips the brim of his cap with his knuckles. Most mercs won’t offer their hand if they’re on a job, and Wiseman seems the type not to take it personally. “Pleasure.”

“Likewise.” Wiseman looks over at Whisper. “Well, girlie, not that I’m not glad to see you, but I got a feeling you’re not here just to see this old face.”

Straight to the point, Deacon can appreciate that. The friendly diminutive is interesting. Dominance games? Maybe, but he doesn’t seem the type. And Whisper’s easy smile doesn’t waver, not even a tick of the annoyed tension in the back of her neck that she hasn’t quite learned to hide when she feels insulted. Genuinely friendly, then.

Which tells him something else he hadn’t quite realized: Whisper likes this man. She likes him quite a bit.

“I’m always happy to see your face, Wise, you know that.” Whisper rubs the back of her neck, a nervous tick that’s as foreign to her as her lazy drawl. “But no. I’m here on the General’s behalf.”

“Yeah, I figured.” Wiseman sighs and sits back in his chair, waving them into the seats opposite. Whisper takes it with a smile, but Decon hangs back, settling his shoulders against the wall in a comfortable lean. Establishing himself as a bodyguard, which has the dual benefit of making himself easily categorized and thus forgettable, as well as signalling to Wiseman that Whisper’s someone important enough to need one. _She didn’t leave the Minutemen for nothing,_ it says, and Wiseman acknowledges it with nothing more than a flick of his black eyes before he leans comfortably back in his chair and folds his hands over his stomach. “Gotta tell you, we were all mighty disappointed to hear you stepped down. This new fella ‘a yours, he’s good, but he ain’t you.”

“Well, it’s always good to be missed,” Whisper says, with a smile in her voice. From here, he can't tell if it actually reaches her eyes. He's thinking not. “But maybe it’s not such a bad thing. Garvey was already runnin’ the joint, he just had me doing the walkabout and taking care of trouble.”

“True, true. Still. We could use someone taking care of trouble ‘round here.”

It’s only because he knows her so well that he can see the suppressed wince in the tick of her jaw muscle. “Yeah, I heard. You know how it goes, I’m down but I’m not out. The General hadn’t heard from anyone up here in a while, so he sent me to take a look. See what the trouble is.”

“You figure it out yet?”

She drums her fingers restively against her thigh. “Raiders, right? We saw their leavings on the road on the way up.”

“Got it in one,” Wiseman says with a grimace. “Some of the traders got through this month, but not all. You know how it is, Captain- the road up this way’s long enough for the merchants already, the last thing we need is raiders making it even riskier. If the roads clear out entirely-”

“You’re up shit creek, yeah, no kidding,” Whisper says. “I get it. That’s why I’m here, Wise. To fix it before it gets that bad.”

Wiseman looks like he’s debating saying anything, but then he fixes his jaw and meets gaze with his steady black eyes. “It _is_ that bad. It should’ve been fixed before now. You know I’m not one to run from a fight, but this?” He jerks his thumb at the flag behind his head. “This doesn’t mean much if you’re not _here._ ”

Whisper- tilts her head, maybe, or sets her jaw; he can’t quite see from his spot behind her. But whatever it is, Deacon can feel the weight of authority settle in over her like a mantle, and he can see it in Wiseman’s reaction across from them. An involuntary straightening in his seat, definitely, but the look on his face isn’t offense, as someone might expect from a man being challenged by a leader in his own territory. It’s the relief that of a man being told that there’s someone bigger and stronger here to fix the problem that he can’t handle on his own.

It’s the first time that Deacon starts to get an inkling of just what she gave up, when she stepped down to follow him around the Commonwealth. Not just the power, but the responsibility. He knew that the Minutemen were important, knew what it meant in terms of quality of life and long-term stability, but he didn’t understand what it meant to people like Wiseman. What _Whisper_ means to the people she’s saved.

He wonders if she misses it.

“I’ll pass it along to the General,” Whisper says, the conciliatory note in her voice contrasting sharply with with the authority of her posture. “It won’t happen again.”

“Thanks… Captain,” Wiseman says, hesitating on her title for the first time. “We all appreciate that.”

“Good,” Whisper says, and leans back in her chair. “Now, why don’t you tell me what you know about these raiders.”

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Whisper slips off after dinner, but Deacon knows where to look. The hazy, firelit dark makes it easier not to look down when he climbs up the fire escape, and he only has to look around for a moment to spot the familiar outline perched on the far side of the roof, silhouetted against the harsh street lamps rising up from either side of the tarberry pool.

He makes his way over and takes a seat below her, back safely to the brick ledge. She makes an amused noise and swivels, planting her feet next to him and dropping a friendly hand to his shoulder. “We are literally only a single story up.”

“And you know what’s under that single story? Cement. I know we packed a lot of stimpaks, but I’m not eager to go through them quite that quick.”

“You have a point.” She doesn’t hop down, though, just braces one hand on his shoulder and the other hand on the ledge and tips her head back towards the cloudy sky. Deacon eyes the backwards angle of her torso, suppresses a shudder, and wraps a hand around her knee to distract her.

“Dollar for your thoughts.”

She looks down at him, raising an eyebrow. “Isn’t it supposed to be a penny?”

_Not the way he’s ever heard it._ Might be a regional variation.

“Inflation’s a bitch.”

She laughs softly. “Nothing worth that much. Just thinking about the plan for tomorrow. I was wondering if maybe we should take some backup.”

He’s been wondering the same thing. Wiseman had a surprising amount of intel on the raider group- _good scouts,_ Whisper had told him, as an aside, _not much in the way of soldiers_ \- and they’re better trained, better supplied, and better armed than the usual hyped-up jetheads. And there’s at least a dozen of them, as far as any of Wiseman’s people could tell. Not great odds. “Aw, c’mon, since when do we need the help?”

Her snort tells him what she thinks of his playacting. “The problem is that Breakheart Banks is well fortified, and it’s got the advantage of sightlines in every direction. There’s no place we could put our people where they wouldn’t be more of a liability than a help.”

“You sound like you know the area pretty well.”

“This isn’t the first time I’ve had to clear that place out.” She intercepts his querying eyebrow and lets out an explosive sigh. “A pack of super mutants was nesting there when we first made contact with Wiseman. I took a crew up and wiped them all out. Always thought it’d make a good spot for a secondary settlement, even a trading post, maybe, if you could spare the people to cut the trail.”

It’s not like her to leave something half-done. “So what happened?”

She shrugs. “Never had the chance to set it up. I left the Minutemen not too long after. Guess nothing ever came of it.”

And now they’re going to have to do it all over again. He doesn’t blame her for being irritated. It’d bug him, too: the wasted effort, the wasted _potential._ “You say something to Wiseman about it?”

“I’ll talk to Preston. It’s not Wiseman’s fault. He’s got enough on his hands, keeping this little social experiment afloat.” He opens his mouth. “Yes, pun intended.”

“That’s not what I was thinking,” he says, faking offense.

“No?”

It’s exactly what he was thinking. “I was going to say that Wiseman looks kind of familiar,” he says instead, which also happens to be true. “A couple of the others, too, maybe. How long have they been up here?”

“Since MacDonough kicked them out of Diamond City.”

Deacon plays it back in his head- Wiseman, he’s pretty sure, used to be one of the mechanics who worked on the water tanks. Holly was a… wall guard, maybe? Those weren’t their names then, though. He’s pretty sure of that. “Impressive that they made it all the way out here.”

“Yeah,” she sighs. Her knee knocks restively against his shoulder. “Too bad I never found the time to bring Hancock up here. It’d mean a lot to him.”

Not just because he’s a ghoul, he knows. She means something more. Something personal? He takes a ballpark shot in the dark and guesses, “That his brother didn’t manage to get them all killed?”

Her jiggling knee goes still. “You’re well-informed.”

He shoots, he scores! “He doesn’t make much of a secret of it. And he hasn’t been going by Hancock forever.”

“I suppose you’d know better than most. But hey, don’t you know you’re not supposed to explain it?” She’s smiling now; he can hear it in her voice. “You’re just supposed to stroke your chin, and squint a bit, and look mysterious.”

He rubs his palm over his jaw and hears the scratch of stubble. He’s been letting it grow out a bit, in preparation for playing Whisper’s pet merc. “I think you’re supposed to have a beard for that to work. At least a goatee.”

“Well, whose fault is that?” She yelps and flinches away as he tickles his fingers up the back of her knee in retaliation. (Not backwards, thankfully. How embarrassing would it be to send his partner off the edge of a roof?) “Wow, rude. I’m just trying to be helpful.”

It’s the most she’s sounded like herself all day. He smiles and turns, resting his chin on her knee. “You know what you could do if you were really feeling helpful.”

She gives a thoughtful hum and drops a hand to the back of his neck, heavy and warm. “I could think of a couple of things.”

_So can he._ He ignores the hopeful pool of warmth in his groin and tweaks the hem of her pants. “Get your mind out of the gutter. I meant about the plan for tomorrow. How do you want to play it?”

“Oh, that.” She rubs the collar of his jacket between two fingers, restless, then flattens her palm over the back of his neck. He can hear the grin in her voice as she says, “I was thinking we’d walk in the front door.”

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

They gear up in a cave a little ways south of their objective, enough off the beaten path that no eager beavers on patrol will stumble over them accidentally. It would’ve been easier to do while they were still at the Slog, but neither of them wanted to risk someone asking questions about how the former General of the Minutemen got to be so good at disguises. _Or_ the nameless merc that’s been following her for the last while.

“I remember this being much less complicated the last time I was here,” Whisper complains, slicking her hair up into a lazy semblance of a raider mohawk. Deacon recommended a wig for something longer, but it’s going to be a close-quarters fight, and she didn’t want to give them anything to grab onto in the melee. “Harder, but less complicated.”

“Harder, huh? The way I heard it, the last time you were here, you stormed the fortress, by yourself, with a rifle in each hand and a grenade between your teeth,” Deacon teases. She makes an annoyed face.

“Nothing so dramatic. I had someone laying covering file from the hill and we took out almost half the nest on patrol before we even got to the base. We were dealing with super mutants, not exactly the brightest crayons in the box, y’know?”

_Crayons?_ he wonders. And then, _we?_

“You’re saying I’m not your first sniper?” he demands, his voice full of mock outrage. “How could you cheapen what we have like that?”

She waggles her eyebrows at him and wipes the grease off her hands. “He meant nothing to me, babycakes. You know you’re my one and only.” She roots around in the pack and pulls out a needle from their sewing kit. “Here, give me your arm.”

Deacon shrugs back out of his jacket, sighing. “You sure you want to go for track marks? If they’re as disciplined as Wiseman said, we might not want to look too strung-out.”

“Would you trust a raider to stay clean? Put it out in the open for one of us, and they’ll write the story themselves.”

It’s a pairing Deacon’s seen a thousand times: the partner smart enough to stay clean runs the show, and the junkie follows them out of loyalty or just enough animal cunning to know a good thing when they see it. Plus, people walk a lot more carefully around spikers. Saying that psychojet addicts have a temper is sort of like saying that the Glowing Sea is a little radioactive, and they tend to go nuke when they go down, so the guards will be a little more cautious than they otherwise might about putting hand on either of them. It’s a good play. Only- “So why do I have to be the junkie?”

“Because I’m going to hit the door first,” she tells him, pulling out their pot of temporary ink. “I need more armor. You can afford to lose the jacket.”

He blows her a kiss. “You just want to see me flex.”

“It’s a side benefit,” she agrees. “‘kay, make a fist.”

He obliges, and watches the needle slip painlessly into the crook of his arm. “This feels familiar.”

She gives him a flirtatious look from underneath her lashes. “I promise not to draw a dick on you this time.”

He lets out a slow breath. “You didn’t seem too complain too much about how that worked out last time.”

Her indrawn breath is the only reaction he gets, but it’s enough to send heat flushing pleasantly into his belly and thighs. She ducks her head down to concentrate on her work, but with her hair slicked back he can still see the flick of her dark eyes toward his face when she says, “We never did get a chance to practice your leadership skills.”

He was ninety percent sure she’d go along with it, but the confirmation still makes his heart go a little faster. “You know I’m always happy to learn from the master.”

She lays another messy row of marks on his skin before she answers. “We could always start testing protocols under more… controlled circumstances.”

She’s giving him an out. Not a surprise, after how he handled it last time. “Learn on the fly, it’s the Railroad way,” he shoots back, not backing down an inch. He’s going to do better this time. He’s going to keep it together. “You know we’re all about field trials.”

“Well, in that case.” She flicks the end of the needle to clear away the last droplet of ink, then smears it clear of his skin with the pad of her thumb, never looking away from his face. “Keep in mind that I’m not going grade on a curve.”

He doesn’t let his gaze waver from hers for a moment. “Wouldn’t have it any other way, partner.”

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

It’d be a lie to say that he doesn’t think about it on the way there. With a lead-up like that, how could he _not?_ Whisper generally has a majority of his attention at the worst of times, and that's without the semi-explicit promise of creative sex at the end.

But he's not the Railroad's longest-lived field agent for nothing, and he sets it aside when they make the approach to the base, lets himself fall down into the twitchy, raw-nerves paranoia of a psychojet addict, hand hovering compulsively over the empty holster at his thigh and dumb-protective of his sober, smarter partner. It gives him an excuse to hover over her, has him stepping too close on Whisper's heels and glaring at the door guard who gets a little too handsy during the pat-down, lingering at the curve of her waist and her calf. When they make as if to tug off her jacket, Deacon lets a growl roll warningly through his chest and they back off, palms upraised, eyeing the track marks on his arms a little nervously.

"Fuckin' spikers," they say, a little less under their breath as they probably thought. Deacon's murderous glare gets a lot more intense, and Whisper steps back into his space, stepping ostentatiously on his toe and putting him in reach of the telescoping stun baton in the pocket of her jacket, if this goes sideways and he needs to reach for it.

"Cut it out," she hisses at him. "We're playing nice, remember?"

He gives the door guard a smile that he knows from experience is way worse than the glare. The guard goes a little pale, and Deacon mentally awards himself a point. "Sure thing, boss," he says, a little smug in his victory, almost as much mumble as word. Psychojet can fuck up the fine motor control, and he talks like his tongue's thick in his mouth, flexing his hands convulsively, reflexively. "I can do that."

"Good boy," she says, and pats him on the arm. The guard rolls their eyes and whistles sharp and low, gesturing one of the other guards forward when some of them look disinterestedly up. A slim young man in surprisingly clean leathers unfolds from one of the couches, sliding his belt knife back into its sheathe.

"Yeah?"

"Take these two to boss man," the door guard says. "They want to sign up."

"Yeah?" the other says again, looking the two of them over. His gaze lingers over Whisper, drinking in her curves with long sweeps of his eyes. "Could be fun."

"Lotsa things're fun," Deacon says. He's not armed (well, as far as they know) but his look makes it perfectly clear that he is ready and willing to take the man apart with his bare hands if necessary. "I like fun."

This new fellow, like the door guard, lets his gaze drop down to the track marks. "Yeah, I bet you do," he says, but he backs off just like his compatriot, not wanting to risk a spiker's temper on a stupid pissing match. "Yeah, sure, I'll take 'em up. Follow me."

As they follow the guard further into the base, Deacon lets his eyes rest on the messy patch stitched into the back of his jacket and allows himself a tiny mental smile. They've had varying degrees of success with this gimmick in the past: some groups are more paranoid than others, and sometimes they end up having to kill their way up from the outside-in. But even the "hard way," as Whisper smirkingly calls it, is leagues easier than breaking through the outer line, especially in a base like this, with open sightlines in every direction and all the cover in the world for the raiders to use. They're both ready to go from the moment they make the approach, of course, but this time is easier than most. These covers were inspired, and he doesn't say that lightly. No group this organized would ever let a spiker in the door solo, but with a partner? Someone who has visible control over his temper, someone clean and sober enough to work with a group? The reward starts to outweigh the risk, maybe even more than if they'd both been sober.

_My clever Whisper,_ he thinks, and lets his knuckles brush against hers as they walk down the narrow hallways. He knows she's scoping the place out, can see the flicker of her dark eyes even in the low lighting, but she pauses just enough to tangle her pinky with his, giving him a tiny sideways smile. The veriest edge of her thumbnail scrapes down the center of his palm, a promise in silence between them, and then she pulls away to get a better look at the breaker box as they exit the stairway to the top floor.

"Here we are," the guard drawls, fetching up against a door at the end of the hall. "Ay, boss man, we've got some visitors. Say they want to sign up."

"That so?" The raider boss is seated behind a desk, cleaning his fingernails with a boot knife like the world's biggest cliche. Deacon barely contains his eye-roll. "You tell them we're not hiring?"

"I think, if you'd give us a chance, you'll find that we have a compelling argument otherwise," Whisper says. Her smile is conciliatory, but her eyes aren't. He watches her hand drop down to her hip and rolls his shoulders into a bone-creaking stretch that puts his hand next to the concealed holster at the small of his back. "We've got a lot to offer to a group like yours, and we-"

Her hand flattens to her thigh, and Deacon draws and puts a bullet between the boss's eyes between one breath and the next. Her blade goes into guard's throat before he can get out more than a broken breath of surprise, and she catches his body on the way down, easing it to the ground before it can give a telltale _thump._ Both of them go still, listening intently, but nobody builds a suppressor like Tinker Tom, and the boss clearly liked to keep himself sequestered from the other peons- they're the only ones on the top floor.

Whisper tosses him the spare clips she was carrying in her jacket pocket and zips it up, wrapping herself in the protective cocoon of the finest ballistic polymer that money can’t buy. Both of them pull cloth caps out from their back pockets, dyed a mottled gray and good at breaking up either her too-dark hair or the shining beacon of his shaved head. She pulls the baton out of her pocket, unfolds it, and slides it into the holster she’d left ostentatiously empty on her left thigh.

“You were clutch during that pat-down,” she murmurs. "Thought he was going to find that belt knife any second."

He grins at her. “That's why ya keep me 'round, boss,” he says, with the too-fast, mumbled cadence of a man who doesn’t like to talk much. “We good now? We gonna take ‘em out? We gonna get the stuff?”

“‘Course we will, baby,” she says absently, staring down the hallway with a thoughtful frown on her face. “Don’t I always take care of you?”

_God,_ how does she always say the right fucking thing? A shiver runs down his spine, and he lets it shudder through the rest of him, a junkie’s craving for a fix. He takes a breath and lets it out slow and wet, licking his lips and staring at the curve of her breasts under the jacket.

“Yeah, boss,” he mumbles. “Yer good to me, boss. Ya always got me.”

“Always,” she agrees, still with that absent voice, but when she switches her gaze back to him, it’s laser-focused. “You ready to do this? You ready to take these bastards out?”

He’s seen the grin on her face through the scope of his rifle a hundred times if he's seen it once. Raiders and scavvers, addicts and dealers- killers all, vibrating with energy and an edge of barely contained bloodlust under the surface. _Twenty pounds of crazy in a ten-pound sack,_ Tommy used to call people like that, but none of them ever seemed as frightening as she does right now, bouncing a little on her toes to check the lacing on her boots and smiling at him like she knows exactly what he’s thinking.

None of them had the calculating intelligence that shines through Whisper’s eyes right now. None of them ever looked at him like they knew how to hold him in the palm of their hand, how to squeeze until all that’s left is the part of him that wants to be serving her.

“I got your back, boss,” he says. “You got me, I got you. Always.”

“Then let’s do this,” she says, and tugs her cap down over her eyes. “The breaker switch is down the hall. Let’s see how these fine fellows do in the dark, hmm?”

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The fight is intense and messy, up close and personal in a way their ops usually aren’t. Both of them are distance shooters by preference, but nobody’d know it to look at Whisper now: a mottled smear of movement through the darkened building, her carbon-coated knife merely a darker shadow against the rest of her, unnoticed in the cramped narrow hallways until it’s too late. They get halfway through the building before someone realizes it isn’t an ordinary power outage and raises the alarm, and at that point things get _interesting._

Deacon does his job, keeps his head down and covers Whisper’s back, shooting more to distract than kill but feeling a visceral surge of satisfaction whenever one of his bullets find their target regardless. He’s going to feel guilty about it later, probably, but that’s later: now is for the heat and rush of it, his gun and the boss’s blade, a perfect synchronized machine of sheer bloody terror, descending on the raiders like a radstorm in the night. They’re shadows, untouchable and terrible, and when it’s over they stand panting with their backs to the front gate, looking the trail of broken and bloody bodies in their wake. At least one of them is still alive, though not for much longer, from the wet sounds of his breathing. Neither of them move to finish him off.

“That what you needed, baby?” Whisper says. If her voice is soft and conciliatory, the taunting flick of her hazel eyes is anything but. “You good now?”

Distantly, Deacon realizes that this isn’t going to be like last time. She’s not giving him his space, giving him a chance to cool down, letting him come to her. In fact, she’s stepping even closer, unzipping her jacket one teasing inch at a time. Beneath it she’s wearing nothing but a soft, thin t-shirt, and even in the low moonlight creeping through the cracks of the gate, he can see the press of her nipples against the fabric.

He doesn’t look away from them when he says, hoarsely, “Could be better, boss.”

“Yeah, I guess you earned a reward, didn’t you?” The jacket unzips the rest of the way, and in the periphery of his vision he can see her lips curl up into a smile that’s more mocking than friendly. “Guess you just gotta reach out and _take_ it.”

It’s a clue the most sex-addled brain couldn’t miss, but still he can’t quite bring himself to move. The part of him that’s still Deacon thinks ruefully, _probably should’ve chosen a different cover if this was going to be the afterparty,_ but it doesn’t help him break through the wall of his cover’s conditioned obedience to reach for her. _She’s the boss,_ he thinks, and his hands curl into fists at his sides even as he leans towards her, intent and hungry, feeling the itch in his palms and imagining how the graceful line of her throat would taste under his teeth.

Whisper’s smile curls wider, a little bit mocking, like she understands his dilemma and thinks it’s hilarious. Then she shifts, arching her back slightly, and he realizes her play.

_Playing with fire, boss,_ he thinks, his gaze dropping down to her chest. He imagines running his hands up her sides, sliding that t-shirt up and out of his way, and bending down to wrap his lips around one of her tight nipples. She’d hold still and let him, and she’d try to keep quiet, but there’s this high-pitched little squeak of a moan she gives when she’s trying to bite it back-

“What’s the matter, baby?” she says, and her voice is soft, but the goading edge to it is not. She _likes_ pushing him like this, likes having her freak on a leash. Likes that he heels to her command, and likes even better teasing him to the edge of his control, knowing that she’s the only thing that can make him break. “Cat got your tongue? I mean, if you’re all tuckered out I suppose I could always go and find someone _else-_ ”

“Fucking BITCH!”

The scream comes from off to their left, and Deacon feels his pulse leap into his throat as time slows down and he turns to see-

-a body hurtling towards them, a skinny frame dressed in ragged leathers with a hatchet raised over a face that he distantly recognizes as the door guard-

_Where did they come from, where the *fuck* did they come from-_

He draws his pistol and fires in the space between one breath and the next, and the guard drops with a gurgle, less than a foot away from Whisper. The hatchet rolls out of their hands with a dull thunk, and Whisper’s head turns to track the motion of it, automatic. Over her shoulder, Deacon sees the door swung wide in what he would’ve sworn a moment ago was unbroken wall. Moonlight glints off porcelain inside, and his belly turns to ice as he realizes.

An outhouse, a _fucking_ outhouse, and she almost-

“Huh,” Whisper says, her head cocked. She nudges at the woman’s body with the toe of her boot. “That was pretty close.”

“That was-” She almost died, right in front of him. His partner, his boss, _his_ to look after, and she almost- “What did I fucking tell you,” he snarls, turning and crowding up against her, twitching at the defiant way she tilts her head back to look up at him. God, she’s so much smaller than him, so _fragile_ for all that she acts like she’s bigger and tougher than any super mutant in the ‘wealth, and she almost- “What did I fucking _tell_ you about clearing a god damn room?!”

He watches the nervous flick of her eyes, the only hint of uncertainty she betrays, and almost thinks better of it. But then she lets out a slow breath and tosses her head, getting her hair out of her eyes with a contemptuous flick, and she’s back. “C’mon, baby, it was an easy mistake. Anyone could’ve missed it.”

_Baby._ Without any further warning, Deacon grabs her under the ass and picks her up in one smooth motion, takes two steps and slams her back against the wall. “I told you,” he repeats, almost mindlessly. She clutches convulsively onto his shoulders, scrabbling for balance, her eyes wide with true surprise. “I fucking _told_ you about clearing a room. I _told_ you.”

Never let it be said that his Whisper is slow on the uptake: her smile is already going sly, her uncertain grip on his shoulders firming as she leverages herself up the wall, wraps her legs around his waist. She wanted him to practice his _leadership?_ He’ll fucking give her leadership. He’ll give her a lesson she won’t fucking forget.

He can feel the blood-heat of her thighs snug around the jut of his hipbones, the heels of her boots pressing into his ass from where her ankles are crossed at the small of his back. He ducks his head and presses his face into the curve of her throat, tastes her sweat and the coppery tinge of blood and feels her pulse jumping against his tongue. “I told you,” he says again, into her throat. “I told you.”

“You sure did tell me, baby,” she murmurs. He can feel the buzz of her vocal chords against his lips, and scrapes his teeth, feels her breath catch before she finishes, a little shakier- “I should’ve listened to you better. I know you’re just trying to take care of me.”

“They don’t get to have you,” he mutters into the joint of her neck. The angle’s a little tricky, but he manages to brace her so that the wall is taking most of her weight, gets her spare blade free from the hidden sheath at the small of her back. “You gotta look out. You can’t let them have you.”

“But that’s why I have you,” she says, her voice syrup-sweet and heavy with lust. She leverages herself up a little higher, gives him access to the waistband of her pants, which he slices open with one clean cut. There’s a short gasp of breath and he’s worried he might have nicked her, but she uses her newfound height advantage to get her teeth into his lower lip, and he stops thinking about much of anything except getting her fucking pants out of the way.

She laughs breathlessly as he stabs the blade into the wall to get it out of the way (and he’s going to be hearing about blunting the blade for fucking _ever,_ jesus christ) and fists his hand into the torn fabric, ruthlessly ripping it open. It gives like wet paper under his hands, old denim worn too thin from years of hard use and too many washings, and he manages to pull it clear till it’s dangling in torn strips from her knees. She’s not wearing anything underneath- but then, she was planning this, wasn’t she?

Fuck, he needs to get inside her, like, yesterday.

“You gonna take care of me, baby?” she mumbles into the hinge of his jaw. “Gonna take care of me like I take care of you?”

“Yeah,” he grunts. “Gonna give it to you.” How she’s managing to get his jeans undone and keep herself braced between him and the wall he doesn’t know but he’s not complaining, either. He slides his free hand down the curve of her newly bared ass and spears two fingers into her, deliberately heavy and too-rough, and her head slams back against the wood with a painful-sounding _thunk_ as a high-pitched moan quakes out of her throat. “Gonna give it to you good.”

“Holy fuck, yeah you are,” she says, too-loud and too-honest for a moment, and then she visibly shakes it off and gets her hand back down between them, gets his jeans the rest of the way open and slides her hand down and in to fist his cock in her hot little hand. “Show me you mean it, baby. Give it to me like I deserve.”

“Oh, you’ll get it,” he promises breathlessly. He pulls his fingers out of her and sucks them clean, showily, laughing inside at the way her pupils dilate and her eyes linger helplessly on his mouth. “You’re gonna fucking get it, boss. You’re gonna-”

Without warning, he surges forward, pinning her heavy against the wall and shoving the head of his cock into her. She’s ungodly tight, lack of foreplay and instinctive response clenching down against the intrusion, but he just holds her steady with one hand under her hip and works the rest of the way in with short little thrusts, working her a little more open with each movement until she’s clinging to his shoulders, moaning helplessly in short, high little whines from the back of her throat.

He couldn’t have known it would be like this, that first time he put her against a wall and kissed her for the benefit of their audience. This is a world he couldn’t have ever imagined, her nails in the back of his neck and her thighs tight around his hips, her pupils blown wide with lust and the mark of his teeth in the join of her neck. He couldn’t have known, then, what it would be like to have this, to have _her_. Couldn’t have known he’d kill to keep it from being taken away.

In the stray beam of moonlight crossing her cheek, he can see the flecks of blood there, just starting to dry. Those hadn’t been there before. Splattered from the raider’s brains when he put a bullet through them to stop her from reaching Whisper.

“Gonna teach you a fucking lesson,” he grunts. “Gonna show you where you _belong-_ ”

She doesn’t look panicked when his hand closes around her throat, which is the only reason he’s able to go through with it. Even so he’s slow to tighten his grip, careful to keep his forefinger and thumb braced against her jaw to keep from squeezing too far, painfully aware that the way he’s holding her against the wall is going to work against him, make it too easy to take it too far, too fast. But Whisper, usually the more sensible of the two of them, doesn’t flinch away like she probably should, doesn’t call a halt or at least a change of position, doesn’t try and get them to move to something a little safer. Instead, her neck goes lax in his grip, her head lolling to the side as her eyes slide halfway closed, and she tightens down almost unbearably on his cock, a convulsive clench halfway to orgasm.

“Holy fuck, baby,” he breathes, without thinking about it, and a breathy halfway moan slides out of her lips in response. It’s just a little muffled from the weight of his palm against her vocal chords, just a little _choked,_ and he thinks he can be forgiven for the way he surges forward even harder, for the way he tightens his grip just that little bit more. “Fuck, boss. _Fuck._ ”

Not his most eloquent dirty talk, but it seems to work on her just fine, judging from the convulsive way she’s clinging at him, trying to get enough leverage to fuck herself down onto his cock. She’s close, he can tell from the fine tremble in her thighs, the tight little shivers around his cock. She just needs a little more to push her over the edge.

“They don’t get to have you,” he growls, and he knows it’s not his cover’s voice, and can’t bring himself to care. Her panting breaths come faster, a little labored from his grip, and he slowly, inexorably, tightens his hand further around her throat. “They don’t get to touch you. You’re _mine._ ”

She gives a muffled little hiccup of surprise and comes about as hard as he’s ever felt her, almost as hard as the first time. It goes on for a long time, shivery little aftershocks that seem to spread through her whole body, twitching into her shoulders and her ankles and her belly, and he fucks her through it, a steady grinding pressure that has her panting desperately, her eyes rolling back into her head. He should probably let up his grip on her throat but he can’t bring himself to let go, can’t bring himself to miss one single second-

His own orgasm, when it happens, seems to come out of nowhere and hits him like a lightning strike, knocking him dumb and breathless and panting through it, thrusting helplessly into the tight squeeze of her cunt and feeling the tail end of her aftershocks ripple around him. He loses track of where he is for a moment, but when it’s over he comes back to himself enough to realize that Whisper’s scrabbling at his arm, trying to get him to let go, her breath coming in labored pants that can’t entirely be chalked up to her orgasm.

“Oh shit,” he says, and drops his hand away from her throat like it burned him. He’d probably step away from her entirely if he could, but since he’s still _inside her_ he can’t just flinch back without doing both of them some kind of injury. “Shit, partner, you okay?”

“Fine,” she gasps, and then takes another couple breaths before she steadies enough to smile up at him. “Just fine, D. Don’t worry about me.”

_Like that’s going to happen._ He could trace the outline of his fingers in the flush of blood coming back into her throat, and knows it’s going to show as probably a pretty spectacular bruise tomorrow. The wince of guilt that goes down his spine is all-too-familiar, but he makes sure to keep it off his face as he helps brace her enough for her to unwind her legs from his waist and straighten stumblingly to her own two feet. He slides one hand down her arm, more of a stroke than to steady her, not really thinking about it- then snatches it away again when she gives him a sweet smile.

_Yeah, you handled that *real* well,_ he jeers to himself, as he looks around, trying to find a spare pair of jeans that would fit her. _And you felt bad for *bruising* her last time? You almost choked her out. You could’ve goddamned killed her._

The image of another throat, paler and already flecked with bruises, flashes across his mind’s eye before he can shut the door on it. He can still remember the exact curve of the rope, the creak of the railing when the weight was dropped, the way the eyes bulged out-

“Hey,” Whisper says, behind him, and he turns to see that she’s cut the shreds of her jeans the rest of the way off, is standing there unselfconscious in her jacket and boots and nothing else, hands tucked into her pockets and looking at him with her head cocked. “Are _you_ okay? Things got a little… intense, there.”

It’s not a complaint- logically, he knows it’s not a complaint, that she’s totally fine and enjoyed herself as much as he did. But that’s because for her it was just good fun. There was nothing he did to her that she couldn’t have stopped a hundred different ways, and she let him do it because she enjoyed it and it was a game to her, just like any of the other games they play. It wasn’t any different, for her.

It’s pretty fucking different for him. “Yeah, ‘course,” he says, his voice easy, a little surprised. He turns to face her, knowing that keeping himself turned away is only going to make her worry, and keeps his body loose, a little slow to react. Like he’s still stuck in the afterglow. Or the comedown. “As long as you’re good?”

“Yeah, couldn’t you tell?” she says, with a little laugh. She touches her throat with the pads of two fingers, and his gaze follows the gesture a little helplessly before he snaps back to her face. She doesn’t seem to notice, her gaze distracted and a little hazy, looking at the nothing just over his shoulder. She comes back to herself with a fond, half-embarrassed little smile that slides between his ribs like an enemy’s blade. “You were great. I’m good if you are.”

The praise, so casually given, hits him almost as hard as the irony. “Of course we’re good,” he says. _At least one of us is._ “Aren’t we always?”

“Yeah,” she says, and her smile is so easy, so comfortable. “‘Course we are.”

He does manage to find a clean-ish pair of pants for her to wear, and she only has to roll the cuffs twice, so they call it a win and start picking over the bodies. They’ll send word to the Slog that the area has been cleared out and _strongly encourage_ them to send a squad in to clear the place out and hopefully stake it for good, but anything small enough to carry and worth the haul goes into their packs. Altruism ain’t exactly its own reward in their line of work, and bribes get expensive. Tommy always called it “creative accounting,” but then he’d steal anything that wasn’t nailed down, so.

“If you really want cheap chems I’ve got a better supplier than him,” he calls to Whisper, on the other side of the room and rifling through some poor stiff’s pockets. She silently raises a middle finger over her shoulder in answer. “Fine, I’ll be at the front. When you’re done corpse-squattin’, you know where to find me.”

He elects to wait outside, the eyes of the dead door guard seeming to follow him as he unlatches the gate and slips through. The rest of the guilt will hit him later, he knows- if it hits him at all. It’s not as if he’s sorry he killed that guard. They’d’ve done the same to him and worse, and maybe he’s not exactly the best arbitrator of who deserves to live and who doesn’t, but that particular hangup was something he learned to get over a long fucking time ago. He might feel bad about how much he enjoyed taking them all out, but then again, he might just chalk that one up to the cover and move on. It’s what Whisper seems to do, anyway. Maybe it’s time to take a page out of her book.

It’s just neater that way, anyway. Deacon wouldn’t have ever put his hands on her throat like that, not on his own. And he sure as fuck wouldn’t have come over all possessive, wouldn’t have looked into her wild dark eyes and called her _mine-_

Yeah. Chalk it up to the cover. It’s been working just fine for them so far.

The muffled creak of the floorboards is the only warning he gets before there’s a warm, heavy weight suddenly staggering him from behind. He almost drops his pack, bringing his free hand hastily up to brace against the gatepost in front of him, and hears Whisper’s rough laugh in his ear.

“I thought I’d be a good partner and indulge your clear preference for picking me up,” she says cheerfully. “It’s one of the advantages of being pocket-sized.”

“You’re so helpful,” he says dryly, but doesn’t try to knock her off. “First of all, I think you’re ignoring some important context-”

She makes a rude noise, right in his ear.

“-and second of all, pocket sized my shapely _ass_ , you’re a lot heavier than you look.” She just laughs at him and starts wriggling around uncomfortably, jabbing something that is very possibly the hilt of her knife right into his kidney. Finally she manages to get her knees properly hooked around his hips, at which point she promptly leans even more heavily against his back, hooking her elbows over his shoulders and resting her chin on her arms. He tries not to enjoy the wash of her breath over his ear and rolls his eyes. “Jesus, what the hell do you have in your pack, lead weights?”

“It’s all those desk fans you love so much,” she chirps, and taps his cheek imperiously. “Onward, loyal steed!”

“I’m going to drop you,” he promises darkly, but she just laughs at him again.

They both know he won’t.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm [sorrelchestnut](http://sorrelchestnut.tumblr.com/) on tumblr. Come say hi! My askbox and chat are always open.


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